City of Beethoven’s 67 houses

Preeti Verma Lal

Standing by the curb of Pasqualatihausat Mölker Bastei 8, it is not coffee beans that one should muse upon. Certainly not count the beans to a perfect 60. Not one bean less. Not one more. Gaping at this off-white fourth-floor house in Vienna, you realise here it is about symphonies. Specific symphonies numbered 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th and an opera titled Fidelio. Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera. The one he wrote in this fourth floor house of Baron Pasqualati. It was in this house that Beethoven lived eight of the 35 years that he spent in the Austrian capital. And it was here that every day he counted 60 beans for his morning coffee. A coffee so strong that it could melt teeth.

A neat staircase leads to the apartment where Beethoven lived between 1804 and 1815. At the centre of the main room sits the piano on which he composed his Fifth Symphony.

This was not the only Viennese house that the composer lived in. At 17, Beethoven had first stepped into Vienna to study under Mozart. Scarcely had he arrived that he had to return home in Bonn to his dying mother. Aged 22, he returned to Vienna again, this time as a pupil of Joseph Haydn. This time, he stayed forever: for 35 years until his death in 1827. In those years, the composer moved nearly 60 houses in the city (some push the count to 80). A map in the city’s House of Music adds the final house count to 67.

Finding Beethoven in Vienna is not as easy as counting his symphonies. Not many homes survive, not many remember the name of the illustrious composer. The one at Probusgasse 6 in Pfarrplatz has been turned into Beethoven Museum, where a modern exhibition leads through 14 rooms. Here, a 32-year-old Beethoven wrote Heiligenstadt Testament, a despairing unsent letter to his brother in which he laments that there will be no remedy for his deafness. The museum exhibits include ear pipes (an early kind of hearing device), a prompt box (that was placed on Beethoven’s grand piano to amplify the sound), his death mask and the key to his coffin.

“A summer house was found in Heiligenstadt; the house is delightfully situated on the quiet and sunny Pfarrplatz … a wide gate leads into the courtyard; wild vines overgrow the open wooden staircase on the long side of the house, which is used to climb up to the primitive rooms”, Joseph Lux wrote of this house in his 1927 biography of Beethoven.

Though Beethoven lived in modest homes, he performed in lavish settings. Like the mansion of Count Lobkowitz at Lobkowitzplatz 2 where he premiered the Third Symphony in December 1804. During the 1815 Congress of Vienna in the Imperial Palace, Beethoven premiered the Seventh, Eighth symphonies and Wellington’s Victory symphony. At the historical Hotel Imperial, the composer jotted notes for his Ninth Symphony and it was in Theater an der Wien in the Schleifmühl quarter that Fidelio opened on a cold night of November 1805.

Exactly 22 years later, Beethoven died in his apartment in the Schwarzspanierhaus (House of the Black Friars); his casket followed by 20,000 persons, almost a 10th of Vienna’s entire population at that time. All schools were closed in mourning. At the funeral, actor Heinrich Anschütz read the eulogy:

“He was an artist and a man, a man in the highest sense of the word. A man about whom we can say, as of no other man before him: he accomplished great deeds, he knew no foulness.”

Beethoven has been dead for 191 years. His symphonies still hang heavy in the Viennese blue sky and shimmer in the Beethoven Frieze by artist Gustav Klimt.