Ludwig van Beethoven was born at Bonn, December 16, 1770. He came of a
musical family. His father and grandfather were both musicians at Bonn,
at the Court of the Elector of Cologne. The family originally came from
Louvain, and settled in Antwerp in 1650, from which place they moved to
Bonn.

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