19 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Beethoven

19 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Beethoven

One of the most interesting men in history. We call him a genius, and in a certain way he was, yet he was probably far below average in what we generally recognize as basic intelligence.

Some people with a musical gift are highly intelligent overall, but Beethoven kind of demonstrates that musical talent resides in a completely separate part of the brain from our ability to compute or reason. Beethoven wasn't really capable in any other field of human endeavor, intellectual or social. In a world without music, he would have been one of these homeless guys who rant on the street corners. He had no education beyond primary school, and wasn't even competent at that level. He was able to perform only first grade arithmetic, and his writing was not much better. He was also possibly bipolar, and was often mistaken for either a madman or an idiot. When he wasn't being mistaken for an imbecile, he was often just disliked for his surly, overbearing personality and his foul table manners.

And yet his musical achievements reached such an elevation that many people cite his work as having occupied the very summit of music's Olympus. He's the composer that we compare everyone else to, the Michelangelo of his own field. And his work could be elegant, sensitive and angelic - adjectives which could never be applied to his behavior. Go figure.