He was the youngest son of Maria Therese, Empress of Austria, herself a
fine singer and well versed in the music of the time. The Elector played
the viola and his chief interest in life seems to have been music. In
Beethoven's time and long before, the aristocracy led lives of easy,
complacent enjoyment, dabbling in art, patronizing music and the
composers, seemingly with no prevision that the musicians whom they
attached to their train, and who in the cases of Mozart and Haydn were
at times treated but little better than lackeys, were destined by the
irony of fate to occupy places in the temple of fame, which would be
denied themselves.
Ludwig van Beethoven, the grandfather of the composer, received his
appointment as Kapellmeister at Bonn in March of 1733, then twenty-one
years of age. A little more than a century afterward a statue was
erected there in the Muenster Platz to his illustrious grandson, Liszt
being the moving spirit in the matter. The grandfather was in every way
a worthy man, but he died when our composer was three years of age, and
from that time poverty and hardship of all kinds was the portion of the
family.
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