born in Bonn in
1770, on a day the date of which is not certain (though we know that his
baptism was December 17th). His youth was not a sunshiny period.
Poverty, neglect, a drunken father, violin lessons under compulsion,
were the circumstances ushering him into his career. He was for a brief
time a pupil of Mozart; just enough so to preserve that succession of
royal geniuses expressed in linking Mozart to Haydn, and in remembering
that Liszt played for Beethoven and that Schubert stood beside
Beethoven's last sick-bed. High patronage and interest gradually took
the composer under its care. Austria and Germany recognized him,
England accepted him early, universal intelligence became enthusiastic
over utterances in art that seemed as much innovations as Wagneristic
writing seemed to the next generation. In Vienna, Beethoven may be said
to have passed his life. There were the friends to whom he wrote--who
understood and loved him. Afflicted early with a deafness that became
total,--the irony of fate,--the majority of his master-works were
evolved from a mind shut away from the pleasures and disturbances of
earthly sounds, and beset by invalidism and suffering. Naturally genial,
he grew morbidly sensitive. Infirmities of temper as well as of body
marked him for their own. But underneath all superficial shortcomings of
his intensely human nature was a Shakespearean dignity of moral and
intellectual individuality.

It is not necessary here even to touch on the works that follow him.
They stand now as firmly as ever--perhaps more firmly--in the honor and
the affection of all the world of auditors in touch with the highest
expressions in the tone-world. The mere mention of such monuments as the
sonatas, the nine symphonies, the Mass in D minor, the magnificent chain
of overtures, the dramatic concert-arias, does not exhaust the list.
They are the vivid self-expressions of one who learned in suffering what
he taught in song: a man whose personality impressed itself into almost
everything that he wrote, upon almost every one whom he met, and who
towers up as impressively as the author of 'Hamlet,' the sculptor of
'Moses,' the painter of 'The Last Supper.'

It is perhaps interesting to mention that the very chirography of
Beethoven's letters is eloquent of the man. Handwriting is apt to be.
Mendelssohn, the well-balanced, the precise, wrote like copper-plate.
Wagner wrote a fine strong hand, seldom with erasures. Spontini, the