Ludwig's school years

[Megan]

Please correct me if I am wrong.
I think Beethoven left school when he was 12 and that his school years were unremarkable, he could not further his studies due to his parents poor financial status.
The idea that he was an untutored native genius has to be rejected I think, he was reasonably well educated, if self educated, I understand that he could speak and write French and he must obviously have know Italian to some extent because all the musical notations were Italian. He was interested in politics and read quite widely on the subject and was fascinated amongst other things in the English system of parliamentary democracy. What he couldn't get his head around was the way that the English managed to reconcile a monarchy to some extent with a democracy, because in Europe, all the monarchies were absolute and of course one of the reasons for the French Revolution was an explosion in popular democracy. But he also lived long enough so see the hopes of that new dawn crushed in the new absolutism of Napolean.
There are some deep areas on Beethoven's own philosophy and what he got from the thinking of Kant and how he saw that relating to his music and the world around him. But that would need a whole new thread to discuss.

[Roehre]

I haven't got he details completely in my head, but the least one can say about B's education is that is was rather incomplete in more than one sense.

He went to a good "Elementarschule", the Tirocinium, a grammar school like primary school, with Latin, maths, reading and writing as main curriculum.
We don't know whether he concluded these school years. There is strong evidence he left the Tirocinium early, before his 12th birthday, without formally concluding the curriculum completely, but (though not completely following everything) was able to visit the Gymnasium for some time after that - as was usual for pupils from the Tirocinium.

However B never mastered maths. His way of multiplying was just adding up a number as many times as he had to multiply that number with - his conversation booklets show quite a couple of shocking examples, i.e. even adding up wasn't always done correctly.

His German is idiosyncratically beethovenian in spelling as well as grammar - and not helped by his rhinelandish accent in a viennese dialect speaking area.

B's knowledge of other languages than German was rather sketchy as well.
His active knowledge of French was very sketchy (according to reports from French officers from the time of the French occupations of Vienna), his passive most likely good. A couple of French dictionaries and grammar books were found in his library.


The Italian musical terms obviously didn't cause any problems, but using that language otherwise was problematic.

Knowledge of English was non-existent.

He did however possess more than basic knowledge of Latin as well as from classical Greek. B was able to read Ovidius in original.
Nevertheless: not enough to be confident. To grasp the details of the liturgical texts of the Mass, he asked others (iirc Archduke Rudolph) to have a look at his own translation of it.

Despite the gaps in his education he was allowed to attend lectures (and able to understand) on philosophy, logic, metaphisics, Greek literature and (iirc) history at the Bonn University. He began his studies in Mai 1789 and seemed to have completed reading that and the following season, as is testified by his friends, but is not confirmed by written testimonies or diplomas of any kind.

He was very interested in a wide range of subjects, as is witnessed by the contents of his library, his quoting of a wide range of authors and sources, and the many advertisements from dailies and other magazines copied out into his conversation booklets.
The authors of books which show signs of heavy usage: Homerus, Plutarchus, Ovidius, Hesiodes, Plinius, Shakespears, Scott, Lafontaine, Matthison, Hölty, Kant, Thomas à Kempis, Goethe, Klopstock, Herder, Ossian and Schiller. Apart from these there were e.g. music books (theoretical as well as practical), travel guides, science books (electricity!) and history books (the History of America; On Nobility) to be found in his library.

So: an education with many gaps, but leaving primary school early eventually didn't mean B didn't compensate by reading himself a lot and -as again the converdation booklets witness- discussing a whole series of subjects with friends and acquaintances.