Beethoven was a German composer whose nine symphonies and numerous piano and chamber compositions mark him as one of the outstanding composers of Western music. He was born on the 16th of December 1770 in Bonn. When he was three, his father, himself a member of the court choir, forced the child to take piano and violin lessons, and perhaps treated Ludwig harshly when he disobeyed. .
During the last year of the old century Beethoven had found himself occasionally bothered by a weakness in hearing. By 1801 he was facing the approach of total deafness. Miserable and embarrassed, he swore his friends to secrecy, avoided social gatherings, and plunged himself further into work. In 1826, Beethoven caught a chill while taking his nephew to join the army. It turned to pneumonia, and he died on March 26, 1827. .
Beethoven Sonatas op.2 No. 1 in F minor.
(composed 1793-95).
This first set of his sonatas Beethoven dedicated to Haydn, the leading musical figure in Vienna in the 1790s and his first and most important teacher there. The F minor Sonata, Op. 2 No.1, shows a terse dramatic concentration; The opening Allegro is dominated by Beethoven's favorite procedure of rhythmic foreshortening, whereby phrases are divided into progressively smaller units. Alfred Brendel has pointed out how such foreshortening contributes to the inexorable drive of the music. The opening gesture a rising staccato arpeggiation to a turn figure in the right hand, punctuated by syncopated chords in the left v/s is stated on the tonic and then on the dominant. .
These two-measure units are then compressed to single bars, half-bars and single beats before the process dissolves into the silence marked by a fermata in the eighth measure. At the same time, Beethoven emphasizes the melodic ascent from A flat to B flat, highest tones in the right hand, reaching a climax at the broken chord with highest tone C played fortissimo v/s a sonority that is itself a compression of the initial rising arpeggio.