Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
2020 is the 250th birth year of Ludwig Van Beethoven! Beethoven is one of the most widely recognized and admired composers in the history of Western music, and served as an important bridge between the Classical and Baroque era styles he admired and the Romantic style his music would come to personify. Beethoven was born December 16, 1770 into a modest family in the small German provincial town of Bonn, where he would study composition and play the piano and viola until moving to Vienna in his early 20’s where he would live the rest of his life. By the end of his brilliant career, Beethoven had become the ultimate fusion composer, taking the best of the classical and Baroque eras and sending it to new dynamic, instrumental, and emotional extremes that would define the Romantic era of music in the 19th Century.
