The Monster——Beethoven.doc

The MonsterHe didnt care much for appearances. While others wore their hair highly stylized, he let his black hair grow wild, like a lions mane. It began to grey relatively early. Many have likened it to Einsteins infamous white halo. He rarely changed clothes and was rather smelly. He was stout, no taller than 5 feet and 5inches. His face was dark and he had pock marks from small pox. He had bushy brows and a large nose. What was kinda neat was that he had a cleft in his chin! He played piano. As for the hands that pounded at the piano for hours, they were broad but I believe with rather short fingers. For him, the act of composition had always been a struggle because he always wanted to put all his feelings into his opus but he always failed. He had a mania for being in favor of Napoleon and he even wrote a sonata to him. He himself wholeheartedly subscribed to that, believing that Napoleon had come to liberate Europe. He was not so lofty that he was above wanting things both ways. The old order had placed accident of birth before personal merit and denied any chance at upward mobility. But he was not particularly corrected when people incorrectly substituted his middle name von for van. While the term van is a regular peasant prefix, von signifies nobility. Later in life, trying to win custody of his nephew, he tried to use his von designation to push his weight around. He was embarrassed when the court discovered this to be a ruse. He was aloof and proud. He thought he was one of the greatest people in the whole human history and everyone should respect him. He earned some fame for his works yet the audience had little conscious of his greatness. And yet his works were mostly described by his contemporaries as bold, defiant, shocking, heaven-storming as some of them even seem today.He was a coward in love. He fell in love several times, usually with aristocratic pupils (some of them married), and each time was either rejected or saw that the woman did not match his ideals. One day, he wrote a passionate love-letter to an Eternally Beloved, but probably the letter was never sent. He was not a good cooperator that he often refused others help. He was unfortunate. He had been seriously depressed for his deafness, isolation, worsening health, the failure of his marital hopes and by anxieties over the custodianship of the son of his late brother, which involved him in legal actions. The only thing that was worth celebrating was that he came out of these trials.The man is Beethoven who is firmly established as the greatest composer of his time or may be even the best in the history. When, early in 1827, he died, 10,000 are said to have attended the funeral. He had become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike composers of the preceding generation,