Beethoven's home town: Bonn

Semperoper

It's easter weekend, and the Germans have Good Friday and the Monday after Easter off. So we took a little trip to Bonn, the former capital of West Germany and the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven.







Beethoven was born in a modest home. This surprised me, because the "van" in Ludwig van Beethoven is an indication of nobility. But the "van" is a dutch word (German would be "von"), and Beethoven's ancestors came from Flanders several generations earlier. So by the time Beethoven was born, the family was made up of musicians in the employment of the Prince Elector in Bonn.

Beethoven's father held concerts given by his son when the son was 7. The program stated that the son was 6, but that was probably due to the fact that Mozart was 6 when he was presented as a child prodigy.

When Beethoven was nearly 17, he went to Vienna in the hope of studying with Mozart. But he had to return after only two weeks because his mother had died, and his father became an alcoholic, so he returned to provide the family an income and to take care of his two youngest siblings . When he left Bonn 5 years later in order to avoid the war in France that was spreading into Germany, he never returned.

But Beethoven loved Bonn, and he wrote to his Friend Wegeler, who had already returned to Bonn, and said that "My father-land, that lovely region where I first saw the light, is still as distinct and beauteous in my eyes as when I quitted you;" But Beethoven did not expect to be able to return until "the condition of our father-land be then more prosperous," (letter from Beethoven to Wegeler, June 29, 1800 ) Unfortunately, Bonn was annexed by Napoleon, and it lost its Prince-Elector in 1794 and with him its patron of the arts. So Beethoven never returned.














We went to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn (Rhinish Regional Museum Bonn) and saw some exhibits on the ancient Romans who settled in the area. Our favorite exhibit was on a much older period, when Neandertal man inhabited the area. The first skeleton was found in 1856 about 40 miles away, and the first skeleton identified as a separate species from modern humans (not a bear or an ancient human) is on display in the museum. This was the beginning of Paleoanthropology. A lot of fascinating discoveries are being made with the recent ability to decode the DNA of the Neandertal Man. The exhibit also made clear some of the most confusing topics. For example, Neandertal Man (Homo neanderthalensis) was a descendent of Homo heidelbergensis. Modern humans (homo sapiens) are also descendents of Homo heidelbergensis, so Neandertals are not an ancestor of modern humans, but rather, the closest cousins. Homo neanderthalensis developed in Europe (about a half-million years ago), and Homo sapiens developed in Africa (about 200,000 years ago). Later, the two species moved into the same place (middle east) at the same time (about 60,000 years ago) and then the two cousins mated. Between 1% and 4% of the Eurasian human genome today seems to come from Neanderthals.


One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibit is that Neandertal Man developed psychological traits of modern humans before humans did. For example, the Neandertals performed a ritual burial of their dead. Why did they do this? Not just for health reasons, because hygienics wouldn't require laying the corpse on its back with its head pointing to the cave entrance.