Beethoven: The Last Three Piano Sonatas (DVD)

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770– 1827) Beethoven started his career with youthful confidence as a celebrated pianist. He ended it as the greatest composer, but in loneliness and isolation because of his deafness.

Beethoven was born in Bonn on the Rhine in 1770. At 22 he travelled by stagecoach to Vienna, taking a week to cover the 500 mile journey. The timing was favourable for the ambitious young pianist and composer. The style and musical forms he inherited from Haydn and Mozart were still capable of further development, and it was a time of social and political upheaval, culminating in the French Revolution of 1789. Fertile ground indeed for the young trailblazer.

Beethoven’s life in Vienna has been traditionally divided into ‘three periods’ separated by two dramatic crises.

These were the onset of deafness around 1800-02 and the Heiligenstadt Testament (in which he despaired of ever leading a normal life and believed death to be imminent), and the death of his younger brother, Carl Caspar, in 1815 which led to the acrimonious custody battle for his nephew. The most productive of these so-called periods was the Middle Period, set approximately between his two major crises.

Rather than fitting into the convenient three phases, Beethoven’s life was much more a musical journey and a difficult and ongoing search, as his sketchbooks show, for a language with which to express his ideas and emotions.

Beethoven bridged two eras. In character he belonged to the nineteenth century and its ideals concerning the brotherhood of man, the sense of the heroic, and the rights