Residence 1
📍Bonngasse 20, Bonn, Germany
1770 – 1792“I was born at Bonngasse 20 in Bonn on the 17th of December 1770, the son of Johann van Beethoven, a court musician and alcoholic, and Maria Magdalena Keverich. The house on Bonngasse is now the Beethoven-Haus museum. My father recognised my talent early and attempted to market me as a child prodigy like Mozart, falsifying my birth date to make me appear younger. The Bonn childhood was not happy — my father's drinking and the financial pressure it created were constants — but the musical education was serious and the Electoral court at Bonn provided excellent musicians to learn from. I left Bonn for Vienna at twenty-one, intending a short visit to study with Haydn, and never returned. Vienna was where everything happened. But Bonn was where the hands first found the keyboard.”
👍 LovedThe Electoral court's musical culture that gave me excellent teachers and a high standard to reach for. The Rhine landscape of the Bonn region. The early understanding that music was the only world that fully made sense to me.
👎 DislikedMy father's alcoholism and his exploitation of my talent. The financial instability of the household. The falsification of my birth date that followed me for years.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Swafford, J. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (2014), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Cooper, B. Beethoven (2008), Oxford University Press
Residence 2
📍Probusgasse 6, 1190 Vienna (Heiligenstadt), Austria
1802“I spent the summer of 1802 in a small house in Heiligenstadt, a village on the outskirts of Vienna, sent there by my doctor to rest my failing hearing in the quiet of the countryside. Instead of finding peace I found despair — it was here that I wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, the letter to my brothers that I never sent, in which I confronted the reality that I was going deaf and considered whether life was worth living without the one sense that made everything possible. I walked in the fields and heard the silence where birdsong should have been, and I understood that everything was about to change. What I could not know, in that terrible summer, was that the deafness would not end my music — it would transform it into something that hearing composers could never have imagined. Heiligenstadt broke me and remade me in the same season.”
👍 LovedThe beauty of the Vienna Woods and the Danube meadows in summer. The enforced solitude that, despite its anguish, drove me deeper into the interior world where my greatest music lived. The quiet that Vienna itself could never provide.
👎 DislikedThe terror of the encroaching silence. The isolation from the musical life of the city. The confrontation with what deafness would mean for a composer — which turned out to be different from what I feared, but I did not know that yet.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Swafford, J. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (2014), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Cooper, B. Beethoven (2008), Oxford University Press; The Heiligenstadt Testament (1802)
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