Prison camp, illness, unrequited love — music that endures over decades and centuries often emerges from difficult situations. These composers turned their personal experiences into symphonies, sonatas and concertos.
1. Hard of hearing, then deaf: Ludwig van Beethoven
When Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Fifth Symphony in 1808, he was already hard of hearing and suffered from tinnitus. By 1814 he was completely deaf. Desperate over his hearing problems as early 1802, he penned the following line into his last will and testament while spending time at a health resort in Heiligenstadt: “Little was missing, and I would have ended my life — but art held me back.”
Contemporaries perceived the “Fifth,” in C Minor, as dark and powerful. It went down in music history as the “Fate Symphony.” Legend has it Beethoven told his secretary Anton Schindler about the famous opening motif: “Thus fate knocks at my door.”
Researchers have cast doubt on the quote however, noting that Beethoven was not fatalistic. At the time, he was also working on the Pastoral Symphony with its fresh, cheerful sounds. “I want to grab fate by the throat — I don’t want fate to get the better of me,” he wrote to a friend. By the time his famous Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824, he had already been completely deaf for ten years.
2. From Wunderkind to pauper: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Child prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was just six when he wrote first short compositions and played piano for enthusiastic nobility. At age 13 he was named concertmaster by the Archbishop of Salzburg. Young Mozart, however, liked his independence, so he quit and moved to Vienna, where he eked out a living with his wife Constanze. Money was always tight.
When he composed his penultimate symphony, the Great G Minor Symphony, in 1788, he was suffering from existential fears and persecution mania. “Dark thoughts” plagued him, he told friends. Even back in the 19th century, that 40th symphony from Mozart’s pen — sometimes dark, sometimes cheerful — was regarded as the “symphony of all symphonies” and is still one of the most popular works of classical music today.
Mozart didn’t live to enjoy that recognition, however. In 1791, aged 35, he died of a mysterious fever, the cause of which has not really been clarified to this day.
3. Torn between love and loyalty: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was passionately in love with Clara Schumann, who was 15 years older and the wife of his friend and patron Robert Schumann. Torn between his hopeless love and his loyalty to his friend, he began work on the Piano Quartet No 3 in C minor, op. 60, in 1855. Mirroring his emotional distress, the opening motif sounds like a sigh.
For more read the full of article at The Dw
