Church records show Beethoven's baptism at St. Remigius Church in Bonn on December 17, 1770, and eighteenth-century custom of baptizing infants the day after birth places his actual birthdate at December 16. The son of a court musician, he would go on to compose nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, and works of such power that he reshaped the course of Western music even after losing his hearing.
No birth certificate survives for Beethoven, so historians have long relied on the baptismal register and the era's near-universal custom of baptizing children within a day of birth. Beethoven himself sometimes claimed 1772 as his birth year, an error possibly encouraged by his own father, who overstated the boy's precocity by shaving years off his age.
Raised under a demanding, alcoholic father who hoped to market him as a prodigy in the mold of Mozart, young Ludwig endured brutal music lessons, sometimes pulled from bed at night to practice. The harshness produced a formidable technician, and by his twenties in Vienna he was stunning audiences with his improvisation and defying convention with symphonies that expanded orchestras and emotional scale alike.
His encroaching deafness, which began in his late twenties, makes his later achievements almost unfathomable: the Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale setting Schiller's "Ode to Joy," was composed and conducted by a man who could no longer hear it performed. At its 1824 premiere, Beethoven had to be turned around to see the audience's thunderous applause because he could not hear it himself.
Key people: Ludwig van Beethoven