No country in the world has presented humanity with as many great composers as Germany. Traditional ideas about the Germans as the most rational and pedantic people are crumbling from such a wealth of musical talents (however, and poetic too). The German composers Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Harp, Wagner - this is not a complete list of talented musicians who have created an incredible number of musical masterpieces of various genres and directions.
German composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Georg Handel, both born in 1685, laid the foundations of classical music and brought Germany to the "frontier" of the musical world, where Italians dominated before. The ingenious work of Bach, not fully understood and recognized by contemporaries, laid the powerful foundation upon which all the music of classicism later grew.
The great classical composers J. Haydn, V.A. Mozart and L. Beethoven are the brightest representatives of the Viennese classical school - a trend in music that developed in the late XVIII - early XIX centuries. The name “Viennese classics” itself implies the participation of Austrian composers, as Haydn and Mozart were. A little later, Ludwig van Beethoven, a German composer, joined them (the history of these neighboring states is inextricably linked with each other).
The great German, who died in poverty and loneliness, gained centuries of glory for himself and his country. German romantic composers (Schumann, Schubert, Brahms and others), as well as modern German composers such as Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss, having gone far from classicism in their work, nevertheless recognize Beethoven's enormous influence on the work of any of them.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 in the family of a poor and drinking musician. Despite the addiction, the father managed to discern the talent of his eldest son and began to teach him music. He wanted to make Mozart second from Ludwig (Mozart’s father successfully demonstrated to the public his “miracle child” from the age of 6). Despite the cruel treatment of his father, who forced his son to spend whole days, Beethoven passionately fell in love with music, at the age of nine he even “outgrew” it in performing, and at eleven he became an assistant to the court organist.
At 22, Beethoven left Bonn and went to Vienna, where he took lessons from Maestro Haydn himself. In the Austrian capital, which at that time was the recognized center of world musical life, Beethoven quickly gained fame as a virtuoso pianist. But the composer's works, filled with wild emotions and drama, were not always appreciated by the Viennese public. Beethoven, as a person, was not too "convenient" for those around him - he could be either harsh and rude, sometimes unbridledly cheerful, sometimes gloomy and gloomy. These qualities did not contribute to Beethoven’s success in society, he was considered a talented eccentric.
The tragedy of Beethoven’s life is deafness. The illness made his life even more withdrawn and lonely. It was painful for the composer to create his brilliant creations and never hear their performance. Deafness did not break the strong-willed master, he continued to create. Already completely deaf, Beethoven himself conducted his brilliant 9th symphony with the famous "Ode to Joy" to Schiller's words. The power and optimism of this music, especially given the tragic circumstances of the composer's life, still amaze the imagination.
Since 1985, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, edited by Herbert von Karayan, has been recognized as the official anthem of the European Union. Romain Rolland wrote about this music: “The whole of humanity extends its arms to the sky ... rushes towards joy and presses it to his chest.”