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Composition & Classical Music · Playing & Producing Music
I worked with the instruments of Stein, Streicher, Érard, Broadwood and Graf. My demand for a more resonant, flexible piano left its imprint on the design of the modern instrument.
My most important Bonn teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, taught me composition. I published my first work in 1783, worked as assistant organist and later Court Organist, and played viola in the court orchestra.
I came to Vienna in 1792 to study, not yet to publish. I worked on counterpoint under Haydn, then Albrechtsberger, and studied Italian vocal style with Salieri — training that made my Op. 1 a success.
From the 1810s I studied older music — Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Bach and Handel — and built its polyphony, church modes and Baroque devices into a new late style of composition.
I learned to control how my music reached the public: hold works back for impact, hire the hall myself, frame new pieces among proven ones, and give patrons an exclusive period before publication.
In the finale of my String Quartet in F major, Op. 135 (1826), I wrote a question under the slow chords and its answer over the fast main theme — the music itself carries the argument.
My resolve, written to Franz Wegeler as my hearing failed: to keep working rather than yield. The same year I wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, resolving to live for and through my art.
When the violinist Felix Radicati said my Razumovsky quartets were "not music", I told him they were for a later age. My most demanding works were judged by the future of music, not by their premieres.
My hearing began to fail in 1798. It ended my career as a performing pianist by 1814, yet my most ambitious music — the middle period and the Ninth Symphony — was composed after it began.
In 1819 Antonio Diabelli invited 50 Viennese composers to write one variation each on his theme. I set out to outdo the field and finished 33 variations, Op. 120, completed in 1823.
