20 fascinating facts

Ludwig van Beethoven was descended from a family of

Belgian beetroot farmers, hence his surname.

His older brother, who died in infancy, was also called Ludwig.

In early letters and written accounts, he is regularly referred to as ‘Louis’. He was born in 1770, but spent much of his life believing he was born in 1772.

Terrible at maths, he never learnt at school how to multiply or divide.

As a young man, he wrote an Elegy on the Death of a Poodle.

His favourite food is believed to have been macaroni cheese… …but he also enjoyed pollock and potatoes. Beethoven thought the wine served at his local inn, Zum weissen Schwan, ‘disgusting’, but he still drank lots of it.

He initially blamed persistent gastrointestinal problems for his increasing deafness.

Among the treatments he tried for his hearing loss was strapping large pieces of bark to his arms.

A visitor to his flat in Vienna said it was so messy that it even had a full chamber pot under the piano.

From 1809, he became the first composer to enjoy a guaranteed salary when a group of patrons paid him 4,000 florins (c£100k today) a year to keep him in Vienna…

… but that didn’t stop him complaining in a letter of 1823 that he was badly paid.

Though commissioned by London’s Royal Philharmonic Society to write his Ninth Symphony, he never visited England.

Ailments during his

56 years included hepatitis, jaundice, colitis, skin disease, rheumatic fever, oedema and cirrhosis of the liver.

In December 1826, he made himself ill by choosing to travel the 50 miles from his brother’s house to Vienna in an open milk cart.

Among those to have helped themselves to a lock of his hair on his deathbed was composer Ferdinand Hiller (left).

In 2005, scientific analysis of his hair suggested he had died of lead poisoning.

The 70-odd minutes it takes to perform his Ninth Symphony was adopted in the 1980s as the standard length for a CD.