ベートーヴェン

This is one of the earliest full-length portraits of Beethoven, painted around 1804 by Willibrord Joseph Maehler, an amateur painter who had been introduced to the composer by a mutual friend. Beethoven was in his early 30s. Two years earlier he had written the anguished letter now called the Heiligenstadt Testament, confessing that his hearing was failing and that he had thought of ending his life. Yet these were the years of the Eroica symphony and his only opera, Fidelio. Maehler shows him seated outdoors holding a lyre-guitar, one arm outstretched, looking away as if listening to something. Beethoven liked the picture enough to keep it on his own wall until he died in 1827.