23.10.2020 to 24.1.2021 in the Ernst Moritz Arndt House

An exhibition by the Stadtmuseum Bonn in cooperation with the Archive, Library and Collections of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna to mark the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. Supported by grant funds from BTHVN 2020.

The exhibition shows the exciting social, cultural and economic environment in the small residential city of a clerical elector, which was in a state of upheaval due to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and in which Ludwig van Beethoven, as the son and grandson of a court musician, was destined for a career at the Electoral Court of Cologne in Bonn. His immense talent as a performing musician and composer, his inquisitiveness and his particularly distressing family circumstances after the death of his mother attracted the interest and sympathy of some of his educated court musician colleagues and members of the court nobility, especially the young Count von Waldstein, who came from the Austrian aristocracy. This helped the young man to obtain a scholarship from his sovereign and employer to continue his studies in Vienna - the city of origin of the last Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Friedrich of Austria, whose father and brothers resided in Vienna in succession as Holy Roman Emperor - before the final downfall of Electoral Cologne before the onslaught of the French Revolutionary troops. (I.B.)