Do you know that:

• The exact date of Beethoven’s birth is unknown. His birth certificate contains only the date and place of baptism: 27 December 1770, Bonn.
• The curse of the ninth haunted 19th century composers. None of them exceeded this magic number with regard to composed symphonies. The first one to overcome the curse was Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), who composed fifteen symphonies.
• Beethoven started losing his hearing when he was approaching thirty. When he reached the age of 48, he lived in complete silence. The probable cause of the composer’s hearing loss was the typhus he had contracted. Nevertheless, he had the perfect pitch, so he could imagine what his compositions sounded like.
• When a CD was invented in 1982, its audio capacity was determined on the basis of the duration of Symphony No. 9, which is 80 minutes. Herbert von Karajan, a famous conductor, was appointed as an expert and said that technology had to enable people to listen to the Ninth Symphony in full. And this is the capacity that a CD should have.
• “Tight-fisted, suspicious and of a violent temper” - these were the features ascribed to Beethoven. Sooner or later, he offended every person he met.
• Beethoven was a connoisseur of coffee and wine. He had a funny custom of counting sixty coffee beans which were then used to prepare his drink.

 Aneta Derkowska, Ph.D