On 29 July, 1826, a younger man climbed as much as the hillside ruins of Fort Rauhenstein in Baden, a spa city 20 miles south of Vienna. Arriving at his vacation spot, he drew two pistols from his pocket. Aiming one at his head, he pulled the set off, however the bullet both missed or misfired within the chamber.
The second pistol, nevertheless, partially discovered its goal. The bullet gouged the left-hand aspect of the shooter’s cranium with out coming into his mind, leaving him slumped and barely acutely aware.
Who was the unlucky particular person? It quickly emerged his identify was Karl van Beethoven, nephew of the famed composer Ludwig, and that his tried suicide was something however a spur-of-the-moment determination.
Simply days earlier Karl’s landlord, Schlemmer, had warned Beethoven that the 19-year-old ‘meant to shoot himself subsequent Sunday on the newest’. Schlemmer discovered two pistols in Karl’s room, however Karl had pawned his watch to purchase replacements.
Why did Karl van Beethoven try suicide?
What pushed him to such a determined state of affairs? Karl himself had little doubt what had triggered it. His uncle Ludwig had ‘tormented him an excessive amount of’, he instructed police investigating the incident. ‘I grew to become worse as a result of my uncle needed me to be higher’.
Posterity has tended to agree with the unlucky Karl’s evaluation. Beethoven’s fraught involvement together with his nephew started 11 years earlier, when the composer’s youthful brother Kaspar died, abandoning his spouse Johanna and nine-year-old Karl.
Kaspar’s will initially made each Johanna and Beethoven Karl’s guardians, however Johanna’s identify was subsequently deleted, seemingly at Beethoven’s insistence. ‘I didn’t want to be certain up with such a nasty girl in a matter of such significance because the schooling of the kid,’ he wrote.
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What precisely was ‘unhealthy’ about Johanna? Her conviction for embezzlement in 1811, after purloining a set of pearls that she was promoting on consignment, was one infamous mark towards her. Johanna was additionally, Beethoven believed, an adulteress – maybe a prostitute – who had killed her husband by poisoning (Kaspar truly died from consumption). Morally outraged, he vowed to ‘wrest a poor, sad little one’ from the clutches of a ‘vicious’, ‘bestial’ mom.
Beethoven’s jaundiced view of Johanna was unquestionably exaggerated – ‘an obsession bordering on the insane’, one commentator has referred to as it. She herself lived in a poisonous relationship, with an abusive husband who allegedly as soon as pinned her hand with a knife to the dinner desk. Kaspar additionally beat his son, and sure Johanna too. Beethoven knew in regards to the turmoil, and needed to take away Karl from any additional risk of home upset.
As an alternative, he achieved precisely the other. 5 years of authorized wrangling for custody of his nephew adopted, which solely traumatised Karl additional. Beethoven repeatedly tried to cease the boy seeing his mom, and exerted an iron management over his schooling. Unsurprisingly, Karl reacted badly, fleeing Beethoven’s house, stealing cash and at one level even putting his uncle.
By July 1826, Beethoven’s stifling protectiveness had pushed Karl to breaking level. His tried suicide at Fort Rauhenstein was, nevertheless, a turning level of kinds. On restoration, he joined the military, married and fathered 5 youngsters. When Beethoven died in 1827, he left the whole lot to Karl, making him financially comfy for the long run.
In fact, Beethoven had by no means stopped loving the nephew he referred to as ‘my son’. He dreamed of shaping a younger man to be happy with, one to fill the void of loneliness that Beethoven’s personal failure to construct lasting emotional relationships had created. However as one Beethoven biographer has put it, ‘he by no means realised {that a} little one can’t be formed like a bit of music’.
Foremost picture by Ludwig Beethoven, Public area, by way of Wikimedia Commons
