How Beethoven’s suffering created some of the world’s most joyous music

On the stage of Bonn’s stark modern opera house, beside the majestic river Rhine, Dirk Kaftan, the charismatic conductor of the Beethoven Orchestra, is welcoming the audience to the first concert in Bonn since lockdown. “We’re so happy to play for you,” he says. “It’s wonderful that you’re here.” His audience responds with a barrage of passionate applause. For everybody here tonight, musicians and spectators, it’s been worth the wait.

Orchestral music is uniquely important in Germany, and no musician is closer to German hearts than Beethoven. Bonn is where he was born and raised, and so this unassuming city occupies a special place in the German psyche – the birthplace of the greatest composer who ever lived.

To mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, Bonn had planned a year-long Beethoven festival, but then Covid rudely intervened and most events were cancelled. However daily life in Germany is now almost back to normal, and many events have been rescheduled. This is great news for Britons, as well as Germans. Germany is one of the few European countries Britons can visit without a fortnight’s quarantine. Finally, British music-lovers can hear Beethoven performed in his hometown once again.

Sitting in Bonn’s opera house, listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, you remember what makes him so special – and why listening to recordings is no substitute for hearing his life-enhancing music live. This symphony is more than 200 years old, but it still sounds fresh and daring (his syncopated rhythms anticipated disco and boogie woogie). 

Yet the highlight of the evening is Beethoven’s Rondo for Piano and Orchestra, played by 13 year-old prodigy Colin Pütz – a performance full of youthful verve, and a timely reminder that Beethoven is as relevant today as he was 200 years ago.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770, the son of a drunken singer, Johann van Beethoven, who was employed by the local prince (back then Germany consisted of hundreds of little principalities, each with its own court choir and orchestra). Ludwig showed an early flair for music, which Johann was quick to recognise, and eager to exploit.

In 1778 Johann staged a concert here in Bonn, to launch his son’s career as a child prodigy. Ludwig was seven when he made his debut, but Johann tried to pass him off as six – the age Mozart was when he became famous. Mercifully, this crude attempt at showmanship came to naught. Unlike Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, little Ludwig was no wunderkind. His genius was more complex.

Beethoven’s talent developed steadily, rather than emerging fully formed. “I grew to love music,” he recalled, “and it grew to love me in turn.” By his mid-teens he was supporting his entire family, playing the viola in the court orchestra and the organ in his parish church. By his late teens his fledgling compositions were attracting some attention, but he was still better known as a pianist. 

In 1792 he went to Vienna to play for Mozart, and study under Haydn. It was in Vienna that he blossomed into a great composer. By the time he died, in 1827, he was renowned throughout Europe. Yet his career was rooted in the lost world of imperial Vienna, a world that vanished long ago. So why is he still so relevant in the 21st Century? And why is he revered here in Bonn – a city he left when he was 21, never to return?

The reason Beethoven is important to musicologists is because he bridged the gap between the classical and romantic eras, between the precise music of the 18th century and the emotive music of the 19th. The reason he’s important to the rest of us is a lot more simple: it’s because his music encapsulates the beauty and agony of being alive. “We finite beings are born to suffer both pain and joy,” said Beethoven, and he had his share of both.

Beethoven knew the joy of being acclaimed as a creative genius. Unlike Mozart, his only equal, he remained successful (and solvent) throughout his life. Yet although he was praised and rewarded for his music, his private life was full of sorrow. His beloved mother died when he was 16. His father was an alcoholic. He never found a wife (despite numerous proposals). He had no children (though he yearned for them). He sought comfort with prostitutes, but found no solace, only sadness.

Cruelest of all, for a man who communicated with the world through music, just as he began to make his name he began to lose his hearing. By the time he died, aged 56, of sclerosis of the liver (he wasn’t a hopeless drunkard, like his father, but he was undoubtedly a heavy drinker) he was completely deaf. 

Yet, like all great artists, he transformed these heartbreaks into great art. “The best of us obtain joy through suffering,” he said, and his suffering inspired some of the world’s most joyous music. There’s something wonderfully redemptive and restorative about his compositions, what the conductor Ivan Fischer calls a journey from hell to paradise. His ability to convey emotion through music was unprecedented, and remains unsurpassed.

But there’s more to it than that. Of all the great composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Beethoven was the first self-made man, the first truly independent artist (Mozart had a go, but he found it hard to make it pay). Bach was employed by the church; Haydn was employed by the aristocracy. 

Beethoven had wealthy patrons, but he was never in thrall to them. He was happy to spurn an aristocrat who asked him to play a concert for Napoleon’s troops. “What you are, you are by birth – what I am, I made myself,” he told him. “There are thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven.” Today, we assume true artists will tell the truth, without fear or favour. In Beethoven’s day, this free-thinking attitude was revolutionary. Both popular and radical, he created a template for the artists of today.

But what makes Beethoven so important here in Bonn? Why celebrate an accident of birth, a coincidence of upbringing? Virtually everything he wrote was written (and first performed) in Vienna. The Viennese have every right to claim him as their own. Yet in Germany, Beethoven and Bonn go together like Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare (another genius who spent as little time as possible in his provincial hometown).

Beethoven’s Bonn shares some similarities with Shakespeare’s Stratford – an artist who made his name in the metropolis, venerated in the place from whence he came. Yet Bonn’s relationship with Beethoven is more profound. Shakespeare in Stratford is a happy story with a happy ending. Beethoven in Bonn is a story of downfall and redemption. It begins in the hubris of the Third Reich, and the nemesis of the Second World War.

Beethoven was lauded by the Nazis as a Germanic composer. No matter that his surname was Dutch, or that he died before Germany became a nation. He was a superman, an ubermensch, a symbol of Aryan supremacy. However, Beethoven was a blameless victim in this cultural heist, and after the war he was one of the few German figures who emerged untainted by Hitler’s appropriation of Teutonic culture. Unlike Wagner, he was not an anti-Semite. 

Unlike Nietzsche, there was nothing in his work which could be exploited for a fascist or nationalistic cause. He was the archetypal “Good German”, a symbol of the liberal Germany which the Nazis had set out to destroy. After the horrors of the Holocaust, his humane music was central to Germany’s rehabilitation. He epitomised what Germany had been, “Das Land der Dichter und Denker” (The Land of Poets and Thinkers) and what it sought to become again. Bonn wasn’t central to this story, but then an odd thing happened: this quiet market town was chosen as West Germany’s new capital, giving his birthplace a significance it had never had before.

Beethoven had little to do with this eccentric decision. The choice was purely practical. Germany was so devastated, its defeat was so complete, that there were few viable contenders for this tarnished crown. Berlin, the former capital, was now cut off from West Germany – an island within East Germany, divided between the occupying Allied forces. All the major West German cities – Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne – had been reduced to rubble. Bonn was just a market town, but it had escaped the worst of the bombing. It was a provisional capital for a provisional country.

It turned out to be an inspired choice. Berlin was a realm of Kaisers and dictators. Bonn was a realm of wine and music. Berlin was a capital of triumphs and disasters. Bonn was a capital of understatement (on the west bank of the Rhine, closer to Paris than Berlin, it was not the capital of a country which wanted to conquer the world). 

“The Germany of the Bonn years has a high claim to have been the best governed of all the western democracies,” reflected Roy Jenkins, in his memoir, Twelve Cities. “Bonn as a capital may have been dull, it may have been monocultural, but it was calm, co-operative and sensible.” It was not a spectacular city, a city you fell in love with at first sight, but after the bombastic terror of the Third Reich, this was just what Germany, and the wider world, required.

Bonn’s era as Bundeshauptstadt (federal capital) was an astonishing success. What John Le Carré called “this unnatural capital village – committed to the condition of impermanence” (in A Small Town in Germany, his spy story set in Bonn) presided over the reinvention and the regeneration of modern Germany. 

When the Bundesrepublik was founded, in 1949, Germany lay in ruins. The country was split in two, shorn of its eastern territories. Its reputation was in tatters. Its historic cities had been destroyed. Almost half of its remaining territory now lay behind the Iron Curtain. Its western rump was crowded with refugees from the communist-controlled east.

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, in 1989, Germany was the most prosperous nation in Europe, and one of the most respected countries in the world. It was an incredible renaissance, achieved in just 40 years, and throughout those 40 momentous years the capital of the Bundesrepublik was Bonn. Beethoven’s euphoric Ninth Symphony was the soundtrack of German reunification, as Bonn relinquished its leading role and the capital returned to Berlin. For Bonn, the Beethoven connection was merely a lucky coincidence, but it had a big impact, nonetheless. It saved this temporary capital from bureaucratic torpor. It gave the Bundesrepublik back its soul.

After Berlin became the German capital again, in 1990, I thought Bonn would become a backwater, but something surprising and rather beautiful has happened here these last 30 years; as its diplomats and bureaucrats have departed, it’s become a cultural capital instead. Its 40-year interregnum as Bundeshauptstadt bequeathed some marvellous museums, including the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (House of the History of the Federal Republic), which charts the complex course of German history from 1945 until today. Vivid, moving and inspiring, it’s like walking through a time tunnel. No wonder it attracts a million visitors every year.

An even bigger treat is the Beethoven Haus, in Bonn’s medieval Altstadt, where Beethoven was born and raised. The building is intensely atmospheric, and it houses the best and biggest Beethoven collection in the world, a treasure trove of intimate letters, contemporary portraits and original hand-written scores. It’s thrilling to see these meisterwerken written in Beethoven’s own hand, with all his crossings-out and corrections. Peering at these priceless manuscripts, the man himself feels very close.

“It’s a third of his lifetime that he spent in Bonn – it’s a very interesting period,” says Malte Boecker, director of the Beethoven Haus, over coffee in the house where the maestro spent his childhood. “He experienced the French revolution while he was in Bonn.” 

The Prince of Bonn, Beethoven’s employer, was Marie Antoinette’s brother, so her execution was big news here. And yet Beethoven’s sympathies were with the revolutionaries. “He wrote music for the emerging civil society – with the ideals of the French Revolution, of equality, of brotherhood, and freedom,” says Boecker. “This is still the basis of European culture – you will find a lot of reflections of these values in the music of Beethoven, and that’s why we can still relate to him.”

Beethoven was progressive in his politics, and in his music you can hear the first stirrings of democracy – especially in his Third Symphony, The Eroica, which he initially dedicated to Napoleon, until Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, whereupon Beethoven scratched out the dedication (so hard that he tore the paper) and wrote instead, ‘To the memory of a great man.’

Beethoven was no angel. He was sharp in his business dealings, and ruthless in his relationships. He went to law to prevent his brother marrying a woman he disapproved of, and fought a legal battle with his widowed sister-in-law for the custody of her only son (he succeeded – the poor lad subsequently attempted suicide). 

“Everything I do outside music is badly done and stupid,” he confessed, but it’s for his music that he’s remembered. As Boecker says: “If you listen to Beethoven, it’s a reflection of our situation right now.”

As Germany resumed its rightful place in the family of European nations, Beethoven the German became Beethoven the European again, enjoyed by Europeans who weren’t even born when the Iron Curtain came down. The European Union’s adoption of his Ode to Joy as its official anthem is a fitting finale to this story: a composer kidnapped by the Nazis, reclaimed by German democrats, whose swansong is now the signature tune of a Europe without borders. “He was at the very beginning of what we call the free democratic society,” says Boecker. “He was ahead of his time.”

Back at the opera house, the concert ends with an avalanche of applause. The musicians bow and bow again, yet the audience keeps on clapping. I’ve never witnessed a performance like it. There’s something unique about this recital, a sense of release, and deep relief, and the hope of better times to come.

At last, the orchestra departs and the punters spill out into the darkened streets. Trams clank across the Kennedybrücke. The mighty Rhine flows beneath. In a café around the corner, still buzzing from the concert, I sit down with Dr Monika Hörig, spokesperson for the City of Bonn, and Tilmann Böttcher, head of programming for the Beethoven Orchestra. We talk about Beethoven’s relationship with Germany, and Europe. We talk about all sorts of things. We could have talked all night. “Beethoven grasps you, and if you don’t like him you’re going to hate him,” says Tilmann, over a beer. “If you like him he’s going to change you. And that’s what he wants.”

“The ideas of Beethoven are still valid today,” says Monika. “He wanted the people to speak their minds, and to emancipate themselves from the rule of kings and emperors. He was very internationally minded, and those values can be absolutely linked to the Bonn of today.” 

“What was very important to him was to see every human as an individual person,” concurs Tilmann. “His music is still living, and still telling us what mankind could be.” And, above all, he was never narrowly nationalistic. “Beethoven was definitely European minded,” says Monika. “He was one of the first Europeans, maybe.”

It's late. We say our goodbyes and promise to meet again. On my way out I pass a table crowded with happy, tipsy people. It looks like they’re celebrating something. A birthday? A wedding? An anniversary of some sort? I scan their faces and recognise some of the musicians I’ve been listening to tonight. I can’t recall the last time I saw a bunch of people looking so contented. For now, I feel much the same. This is what Beethoven does to you. This is what Beethoven has done for Bonn.

“A true artist has no pride,” reflected Beethoven. “He sees that art has no limits. He senses how far he is from his goal, and though he may be admired by others, he mourns that he has not yet arrived at that point where his genius shines like a distant sun.”

He was quite right, of course. No artist ever reaches that point, but in his symphonies, his late sonatas and his last few string quartets, he came closer than any composer has ever come, before or since. “Friendship, kingdoms, empires – all is just a mist which a breath of wind can disperse,” he declared, but after kingdoms and empires and even our closest friendships have dispersed, his music will endure.

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