Beethoven biography for kids book

Beethoven, Ludwig van, great German composer whose unsurpassed genius, expressed with supreme mastery in his syms., chamber music, concertos, and piano sonatas, revealing an extraordinary power of invention, marked a historic turn in the art of composition; b. Bonn, Dec. 15 or 16 (baptized, Dec. 17), ; d. Vienna, March 26, (Beethoven himself maintained, against all evidence, that he was born in , and that the date referred to his older brother, deceased in infancy, whose forename was also Ludwig.) The family was of Dutch extraction (the surname Beethoven meant “beet garden” in Dutch). Beethoven’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Mechelen, Belgium, Jan. 5, ; d. Bonn, Dec. 24, ), served as choir director of the church of St. Pierre in Louvain in ; in he went to Liège, where he sang bass in the cathedral choir of St. Lambert; in he became a member of the choir in Bonn; there he married Maria Poll. Prevalent infant mortality took its statistically predictabl