Who were Beethoven's contemporaries?
Ludwig van Beethoven lived from 1770 to 1827, in a time of upheaval. Alongside him, rulers, poets, painters and thinkers shaped the very same years.
Beethoven's lifespan is highlighted, the other bars show a few notable contemporaries.
Meanwhile, in the same years.
The scratched-out name
Beethoven had at first called his third symphony “Bonaparte”. When Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804, he scratched the name off the title page so hard that a hole was left in the paper. Two years later it appeared in print as the Eroica, composed to honor the memory of a great man. The name, however, was gone.
The meeting
In July 1812 Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe met in Teplitz in Bohemia, four times within five days. They never saw each other again. Goethe wrote that he had never met an artist so focused and forceful. Beethoven found that Goethe enjoyed the air of the court too much.
By a lady
Beethoven had long made a name for himself across Europe when Jane Austen published her novels between 1811 and 1816, all without her name, only “By a Lady”. For a woman of good family, writing for money was not considered proper. Her name appeared on none of her books in her lifetime.
A wave in Japan
When Beethoven died in 1827, Katsushika Hokusai was 66 and had been famous in Japan for a long time. His great wave came a few years later. In Europe he was still almost unknown at the time.
The road to Vienna
When Mozart died in Vienna in 1791, Beethoven was 20 and still living in Bonn. A year later he moved to Vienna himself to study with Joseph Haydn, and stayed there until his death.
The same fate
From about 1798 Beethoven gradually lost his hearing, at the age of 27. In Spain, Francisco de Goya had already been completely deaf since 1793, after a severe illness. Both went on working without hearing for the rest of their lives.
This is one slice. Parallel shows the rest.
Parallel shows you contemporaries at a glance, across art, music, science and politics. For anyone you are curious about, you can see who lived at the same time.
