This old city on the Rhine, frequently mentioned by Tacitus, older than Christianity, the scene of innumerable battles from Roman times up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, has much that is interesting about it, but is distinguished chiefly on account of having been Beethoven’s birthplace.  It was for five centuries (from 1268 to 1794) in the possession of the Electors of Cologne.  The last one of all, Max Franz, who succeeded to the Electorate when Beethoven was fourteen years of age, and who befriended him in various ways was, in common with the entire Imperial family, a highly cultivated person, especially in music.  He was the youngest son of Maria Therese, Empress of Austria, herself a fine singer and well versed in the music of the time.  The Elector played the viola and his chief interest in life seems to have been music.  In Beethoven’s time and long before, the aristocracy led lives of easy, complacent enjoyment, dabbling in art, patronizing music and the composers, seemingly with no prevision that the musicians whom they attached to their train, and who in the cases of Mozart and Haydn were at times treated but little better than lackeys, were destined by the irony of fate to occupy places in the temple of fame, which would be denied themselves.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the grandfather of the composer, received his appointment as Kapellmeister at Bonn in March of 1733, then twenty-one years of age.  A little more than a century afterward a statue was erected there in the Muenster Platz to his illustrious grandson, Liszt being the moving spirit in the matter.  The grandfather was in every way a worthy man, but he died when our composer was three years of age, and from that time poverty and hardship of all kinds was the portion of the family.  Beethoven’s father was careless and improvident.  His salary of 300 florins, about $145, was all they had upon which to live.  The mother was the daughter of a cook and the widow of a valet de chambre to one of the Electors.  She was kind-hearted, of pleasant temper and lovable disposition, and the affection between mother and son was deep and lasting.  The father was stern, and a strict disciplinarian, as so often happens in such cases.  He was determined that the son should do better than himself, being willing to furnish the precept, if not the example.

Reared in this school of adversity the boy had a hard life.  His father was his first teacher, teaching him both violin and clavier.  He began with him as early as his fourth year; he seems to have been aware of the boy’s ability, but had no consideration, and was a hard taskmaster.  Before he was nine years of age, however, the boy’s progress was so great that the father had no more to teach him.