Beethoven wasn’t just history’s greatest composer but also one of its greatest human beings

Ludwig van Beethoven isn’t just my favourite composer: he’s my household god. There’s a bust of him on my mantelpiece. It took ages to find something that did him justice. This one was made in Italy about 100 years ago; it’s painted to look like black marble, his features are modelled on his life mask and it gets his hair right. (This mattered to Beethoven: when August von Kloeber painted him in 1818, the composer ‘expressed delight at the treatment of his hair’.) Above my stereo system there’s a Victorian copy of another portrait of Beethoven; it’s striking but undistinguished. As for the statuette in my bathroom, I should really throw it out, but consigning an image of Beethoven to a black rubbish sack seems like sacrilege — especially in the year that is the 250th anniversary of his birth, which the German government has ponderously declared to be ‘a matter of national importance’.

I’ve been a Beethoven-worshipper since I was eight years old, when my father bought our first record player. At the time we owned only one LP, given to my mother by an old flame who’d been an officer in the German army. She was also a second world war army veteran, though on our side, of course. She was nearly killed by a long-range German rocket in 1944, but she didn’t hold it against ‘Uncle Heinrich’, as we knew him, who in any case had impeccable musical judgment.

The record was Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111 in C minor, played by Wilhelm Backhaus. His style was magisterial, a touch humourless perhaps, but in the finale’s syncopated third variation he really lets rip. ‘This is like jazz!’ I told my father, illustrating the point by jiving round the room. Years later I discovered that it’s often called ‘the boogie-woogie variation’.