The story
In the spring of 1820, in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven sat for Joseph Karl Stieler, court painter to the kings of Bavaria. Beethoven disliked sitting for portraits and agreed mainly to please his friends Franz and Antonie Brentano. Stieler showed him with the manuscript of the Missa solemnis, the great mass he was then writing, and that face became the Beethoven reproduced ever since. The original canvas belongs to this house in Bonn, where he was born.
The Beethoven House is primarily a composer's museum, and the portrait is part of a much larger story. The family rented a flat in the garden wing of Bonngasse 20, and Beethoven was born in a small attic room in December 1770. By the 1880s the building was dilapidated, so in 1889 a group of 12 Bonn citizens formed an association to save it, and the museum opened in 1893.
The rooms hold his last piano, built in Vienna by Conrad Graf, the brass ear trumpets he used as his hearing failed, his viola from the Bonn court orchestra, and the console of a church organ he played as a boy. In 1944 a fire bomb landed on the roof, and the staff stopped it before the house burned.
