Charlotte Mason Composer Study: Beethoven
A term with Beethoven, the composer who kept a sketchbook all his life.
By Maestro
Beethoven's music is full of drama: storms, struggle, and triumph. Children respond to it immediately. His life holds one of the most encouraging lessons any young composer can learn, too: great music is rarely written in one go. It is worked at, sketched, crossed out, and tried again.
Who was Ludwig van Beethoven?
Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer born in Bonn. He studied music as a boy, and as a young man moved to Vienna, where he took lessons from Joseph Haydn and studied counterpoint with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. He became the most celebrated composer of his age, writing nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, string quartets, concertos, and an opera.
In his late twenties Beethoven began to lose his hearing, and over the following years it worsened until he was almost completely deaf. He kept composing. Some of his greatest works, including the Ninth Symphony, were written when he could no longer hear them played.
Six pieces for one term
- Für Elise. A short piano piece many children already know. A gentle start.
- Symphony No. 5, first movement. Built almost entirely from one tiny four-note idea, short-short-short-long. Ask your child to count how many times they hear it.
- Piano Sonata No. 14 ("Moonlight"), first movement. Slow, quiet, and mysterious.
- Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral"), fourth movement. A thunderstorm in music, complete with rain, wind, and thunder, then the calm afterward.
- Symphony No. 7, second movement. A steady, solemn rhythm that grows from a whisper to the whole orchestra.
- Symphony No. 9, final movement ("Ode to Joy"). The famous tune, first played quietly by the low strings, then by the whole orchestra, then sung by a choir.
A gentle weekly rhythm
- Listen first, without explanation.
- Narrate. What did your child hear? What happened in the music?
- Add one fact: a story from Beethoven's life, an instrument, or what the piece describes.
- Listen again.
Narration prompts for Beethoven
- How many times did you hear the short-short-short-long idea?
- What did the storm sound like? When did it end?
- Did the music get louder or softer? Where?
- What was the mood at the beginning, and how did it change by the end?
- If you could ask Beethoven one question, what would it be?
Beethoven's sketchbook habit
Beethoven carried sketchbooks with him and filled them with musical ideas: fragments, false starts, and new versions of the same melody. Thousands of pages survive. They show him working on a tune again and again until it was right, sometimes over years.
This is one of the best lessons a child can learn from a composer. Give your child a notebook, or a folder for their pieces, and call it their sketchbook. When they have an idea, write it down. Later, return to it and try changing one thing. A child who learns that first ideas are meant to be revised is learning how composers actually work.
Where Gradus fits
Gradus gives every student a sketchbook of their own and teaches composition the way Beethoven learned it: through counterpoint, harmony, and steady practice, era by era. Your child writes music from the very first lesson, and Maestro, your child's personal composition tutor, does the teaching, so you don't need to read music.
Read more about Beethoven as a composer, look up a motif in the Gradus dictionary, or see a sample lesson.