urban "*#tlkling5"entertainment. Rival families supported groups of musicians, quar- tets, and chamber orchestras. Playing a musicalinstrument and patronizing musicians was as acceptable an aristocratic pastime as hunting or attending masked balls. Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven's friend and neighbor on fashionable Alserstrasse, was a pianist of high competence. The emperor himself played the violin. But the motley audiences who paid admission to urban concerts would hardly have been among Count Esterhazy's invited guests. Beethoven's first public appearance in a benefit concert for Mozart's widow spread his fame across the whole community. Pleased by his piano concertos, the audiences came back. On April z, 1800, at the first public concert all his own, he offered the First
air max ltd white red (C Major) Symphony, which was
still in the Mozartian mold.
The widening audience for orchestral music and for Beethoven's work was revealed in the three earliest performances of the "Eroica." First heard in August 1804 in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, in a room only fifty-four feet long and twenty-four feet wide, it was played again that December in the home of a wealthy banker. Then in April 1805 it was performed in the Theater an der Wien to a large paying audience. Located just outside the city walls, this spacious playhouse was said to be the largest on the Conti- nent. It was the
jordan se 15 white on white scene of the premieres of Mozart's Magic Flute and Beetho- ven's own Fidelio. Court officials noted that the occasion showed how music was appealing to not only the "higher and middle orders" but "even the lower orders."
About 1798, at the maturing of his powers as a composer, Beethoven, not yet thirty, began to be troubled by the ringing in his ears, the first hints of the affliction that would dominate his life. Perhaps originating in an
Nike women air max 2009 white blue attack of typhus or another dangerous illness about 1798, the deafness became increasingly troublesome. On October 6, 1802, from a village near Vienna, he wrote his premature farewell in
nike air maxes 2011 a letter to his two brothers. This cameto be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, for it was written in the villagewhere he had hoped to enjoy the sounds as well as the sights of the country- side, but where he realized that his deafness would be incurable. After asking forgiveness for seeming "unfriendly, peevish, or even misanthropic," he recounted his six years' affliction "with an incurable complaint which has been made worse by incompetent doctors." His deafness, he was now convinced, was permanent:Though endowed with a passionate and lively temperament and even fond of the distractions offered by society I was soon obliged to seclude myself and live in solitude. If at times I decided just to ignore my infirmity, alas! how cruelly was I then driven back by the intensified sad experience of my poor hearing. Yet I could not bring myself to say to people: "Speak up, shout, for I am deaf." Alas!
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