Course Welcome and Overview

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Declaration of Independence, July 1776        

      Welcome to the course on Ludwig van Beethoven.  We will explore Beethoven's thirty one year career as a professional composer (1795 - 1826).  Beethoven, perhaps more than any other composer in history, influenced the future of instrumental classical music.  Today, 191 years after his death, he is widely considered the greatest composer of symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas who ever lived.  In this course, we will discuss what Beethoven's music was about and how his innovations in composing changed the direction of music for the rest of the 19th century and even into the 20th.  

      Until 1801, when he was 30, Beethoven was a classical era composer, much indebted to his immediate predecessors Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Then he began transitioning his music towards what would become the Romantic era of music in the 1830s.    He can be seen as the primary bridge between the music of Mozart and the music of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Robert Schumann, the first fully romantic composers.

      Beethoven grew up in the culminating years of an intellectual movement called the Enlightenment which, among other things, urged great political and social reforms in Europe.  It helped spawn the American Revolution in 1775 and also the French Revolution in 1789 (Beethoven was 18 years old at the time).  The French Revolution, followed by Napoleon's rule in France, put Europe at war for over 20 years.  Following Napoleon's final exile in 1815, the monarchs of Europe repressed freedom of speech, especially calls for more individual liberties and democrat government.  We will see how these events influenced Beethoven's music.