THE LUDWIG VAN MYTH
The Beethoven town of Baden bei Wien is celebrating the anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Ludwig van Beethoven was born 250 years ago in Bonn. The great master of classical music also lived and composed in Baden bei Wien. The town is honouring him with an exhibition in the anniversairy year.
Genius, rebel, myth
2020 will mark the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. To mark this occasion, the Baden Kaiserhaus will be presenting the exhibition ‘THE LUDWIG VAN MYTH’ from 9 November 2019 to 20 December 2020. The show is worth seeing, not just for hardcore classical music lovers. Several showpieces and visual representations from museums both within and outside Austria (Beethoven House Bonn) and from private collections (Biblioteca Beethoveniana) can be viewed in the Baden Kaiserhaus, creating a very interactive exhibition. You can visit the composer’s deathbed, where friends made masks of his corpse, and cut off locks of his hair and pieces of clothing. Or in the salon, where artists stylised the composer into an icon; with the ‘Mythomat’, you can create your own personal picture of Beethoven, and ‘typical’ Beethoven compositions are reimagined in the music room. This is the real highlight of the exhibition: the historical and recently restored pianoforte from the Beethoven House in Baden, which the composer played while staying in Baden.
Capture Beethoven
No research is left out: Beethoven’s political opinion is discussed just as much as his love of nature, or his part in the history of music. As an opening event and accompaniment to the exhibition, a series of events entitled ‘A visit to LUDWIG VAN’ will take place on the last Friday of the month in the Beethoven House in Baden. Ö1 radio legend Johannes Leopold Mayer invites guests to evenings of discussions with music, and there will also be monthly concerts in the exhibition rooms from January 2020. Our tip: Combine the exhibition with a visit to the Beethoven House. The Biedermeier house in Rathausgasse 10, marvellously renovated in 2014, is a regular pilgrimage site for Beethoven fans, it was here that he composed key parts of his world-famous 9th Symphony.