This opening finds Beethoven at his most playful: After a loud chord intoned by the full orchestra, the first violins slowly work their way up the notes of the scale, first three notes ...

As if that weren’t enough, bones believed to be fragments of Beethoven’s skull — long stashed in a tin marked “Beethoven” by the descendant of a Viennese doctor — were recently donated to the Medical ...

Beethoven’s housekeepers remembered that, as his hearing got worse, he would sit at the piano, put a pencil in his mouth, touching the other end of it to the soundboard of the instrument, to feel the ...

researchers deduced that Beethoven’s deafness was not genetic and also found there were no genetic markers for abdominal pains that caused a lingering sour note in the composer’s 20s.

Beethoven began working on the Tenth Symphony alongside his Ninth, which includes the world-famous "Ode To Joy". But he quickly gave up on the Tenth, leaving only a few notes and drafts by the ...

Researchers have had to rely on notes from the composer’s two autopsies, preformed after he was exhumed in 1863 and 1888, and other historical documents. Clues, however, could hide in Beethoven ...

"The orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the audience was cold and exhausted," the Houston ensemble notes. "Beethoven’s legendary symphony thus probably went relatively unnoticed upon its first ...

Beethoven began losing his hearing in his mid ... diaries, and physicians' notes for evidence, as well as reports on skeletal remains from when his body was exhumed in 1863 and 1888.