Sometime between the births of his two younger brothers, Beethovens father began teaching him music with an extraordinary rigor and brutality that affected him for the rest of his life. Neighbors provided accounts of the small boy weeping while he played the clavier, standing atop a footstool to reach the keys, his father beating him for each hesitation or mistake. On a near daily basis, Beethoven was flogged, locked in the cellar and deprived of sleep for extra hours of practice. He studied the violin and clavier with his father as well as taking additional lessons from organists around town. Whether in spite of or because of his fathers draconian methods, Beethoven was a prodigiously talented musician from his earliest days and displayed flashes of the creative imagination that would eventually reach farther than any composers before or since. Hoping that his young son would be recognized as a musical prodigy à la Mozart, Beethovens father arranged his first public recital for March 26, 1778. Billed as a little son of six years, (Mozarts age when he debuted for Empress Maria Theresia) although he was in fact seven, Beethoven played impressively but his recital received no press whatsoever. Meanwhile, the musical prodigy attended a Latin grade school named Tirocinium, where a classmate said, Not a sign was to be discovered& of that spark of genius which glowed so brilliantly in him afterwards. Beethoven, who struggled with sums and spelling his entire life, was at best an average student, and some biographers have hypothesized that he may have had mild dyslexia. As he put it himself, Music comes to me more readily than words. In 1781, at the age of 10, Beethoven withdrew from school to study music full time with Christian Gottlob Neefe, the newly appointed Court Organist. Neefe introduced Beethoven to Bach, and at the age of twelve Beethoven published his first composition, a set of piano variations on a theme by an obscure classical composer named Dressler.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 02:03:00 +0000
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