A walk in Vienna and its environs can reveal some of the places where the composer lived.
Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms (among others) are symbolized in Vienna not only with monuments but also with museums (two, in Schubert's case: his birthplace, and the house in which he died), but it is Beethoven who is represented most. With several museums devoted to him, some of which contain his own personal effects, there exist in and around Vienna more sites associated with Beethoven than with any other composer who graced the city.
Though born in Bonn, Beethoven spent most of his adult life in the Austrian capital. His birthplace is now an important archive and museum, containing the most comprehensive Beethoven collection in the world, but he lived there only for the first four years of his life. The Bonn house in which he grew to young manhood was destroyed during the Second World War.
He first journeyed to Vienna at 17, in 1787, hastened back to Bonn at the news his mother was dying, and returned to Vienna, ultimately for good, in 1792. He undertook some concert tours to Prague, Leipzig and Berlin (1795), to Pressburg and Budapest (1800), and stayed briefly at the health spas in Teplitz and Karlsbad, but from 1792 onward his stay in Vienna was permanent.
There is evidence that Beethoven lived in more than 60 different places (some sources mention at least 80) during his 35 years in Vienna. Sixteen of the 27 documented dwellings he occupied during his time there were located in what is now the inner city, the old part of Vienna now surrounded by The Ring, the enormous boulevard which circumvents the heart of the city.
Some of the buildings in which Beethoven lived now contain museums devoted to him (Gedenkrume, memorial rooms) and are open to the public (Mlkerbastei 8 in Vienna, and Rathausgasse 10 in nearby Baden). Other buildings, some of them still private residences, are not museums but are merely identified by the characteristic red and white Austrian banners with a plaque stating Beethoven lived there (such as the corner house at Beatrixgasse-Ungargasse 5 in Vienna, where Beethoven worked on the Missa Solemnis in 1819 and where he finished the ninth symphony in 1824). Many more still serve as public or commercial buildings, and even private quarters, but offer no indication of their former illustrious tenant (Ballgasse 6 in Vienna). Many of the structures in which Beethoven lived during the course of his life in Vienna have been demolished altogether, allegedly in the name of "progress." (Cases in point are the house in which he died, demolished in 1904, and Tiefergraben 241, one of his first residences in Vienna). Some of the buildings no longer extant still warrant mention here because of the importance of their Beethoven association, even though some of the present buildings give no clue that the composer once lived on that site.
Beethoven's powers of concentration in composing his music may have been supreme, but in his personal nature he was restless in the extreme. He seems to have changed lodgings as often as he did his servants later in life. Indications are that in some cases he didn't have to pay rent for a flat if he wasn't actually occupying it for a period. Finding a flat in Vienna was easier then than now, and, never a home-owner, he didn't have much furniture to move. These points help explain his consistent movement from place to place, and why he sometimes retained several flats simultaneously. Yet another reason was his usual disregard of conventional, external considerations, which often caused friction with neighbors, janitors, servants and landlords. Accordingly, scores of Beethoven sites now exist.
Early in 1803 Beethoven was provided with an apartment at the Theater an der Wien by J.E. Schikaneder, a librettist (and, from 1801, the theater's manager). Beethoven's flat was in a building, no longer extant, that was part of the Theatre complex. There are indications Beethoven used this flat primarily to receive visitors, while composing elsewhere. Still an active theater, the Theate an der Wien was the site of the first public performances of several of the composer's most important works: his third symphony ("Eroica"), which Beethoven himself conducted on April 7, 1805, and his only opera, Fidelio, performed there in its revised form on May 23, 1814. This theater was also the site of the first performance, on December 22, 1808, of the composer's fifth and sixth symphonies (which were in fact composed in reverse-order), and the Fantasy for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra. It was a mammoth concert in which Beethoven himself took part.
While today many go south for the winter, Beethoven often went "south" for the summer, to the towns of Baden and Mdling. Times have changed: a simple jaunt for us today was a veritable journey in Beethoven's era. Some of Beethoven's summer locales were, in his day, as geographically distant from Vienna, and from each other, as his early and late works were, musically. Now easily reached by bus or tram, Baden and Mdling were then, before the railroad era, essentially a day's journey by carriage or coach from the city limits.
Beethoven also visited Hetzendorf, Penzing, Dbling, Heiligenstadt, and Jedlesee. These were self-contained towns in the composer's day but today are integral geographical components of the city of Vienna. The Jedlesee location (today, Jeneweingasse 17) was then the residence of Princess Marie Erddy, where Beethoven was invited during the summers of 1801-1803.
Before leaving the city for the summer, Beethoven usually arranged to have his mail sent to his publishers for later retrieval. There are several reasons documented information on the composer's summer residences is not as abundant as for some of his city dwellings. At best, his letters from the country usually bear only the town of origin, and sometimes the date. Especially in his later years, Beethoven had the egregious habit, endearing him to historians and scholars, of misdating his letters. In one rather obvious but non-crucial case, he actually wrote 1088 (sic) instead of 1808. Perhaps no-one in the entire history of music better exemplifies the image of The Absent-Minded Composer than does Beethoven. To compound and crown the confusion further, most of the specific locations had different addresses in Beethoven's day - the houses differently numbered and the streets differently named. The researcher faces a rich assortment of obstacles.
Among the numerous Beethoven residences in Vienna proper, only three buildings remain essentially as he knew them: Mlkerbastei 8, Auerspergstrasse 3, and Laimgrubengasse 22. All the others have been either substantially modified, or altogether replaced by new structures. Of these three original Beethoven locations, the first is by far the most important; the second is not a museum; and the third is closed during the winter and is accessible only by advance arrangement intermittently during the tourist seasons.
Beethoven lived and died before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Though by nature he was quite indifferent to material extravagance, by today's standards even some of his more "luxurious" personal surroundings might be called quaint by some and primitive by others. Both would be right.
