Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 17, 1770. He was not only one of the greatest composers, but also a kind of “bridge” from classicism to romanticism. Interesting facts about Beethoven can help you get to know this powerful, controversial personality better.
Facts from the life of Beethoven
- The great composer was the third in the family, Ludwig van Beethoven. The first was his grandfather, who became a famous Bonn musician, and the second was his older brother, who was born 6 years earlier.
- Beethoven's father was a tenor in the court choir. And he was obsessed with the idea - to make his son, in whom he early noticed a musical talent, "a second Mozart."
- Forced to leave school at the age of eleven, future great musician never learned multiplication and division.
- The lack of education did not prevent Beethoven from becoming a real polymath in the field. classical literature. He was well versed in the work of Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer, Plutarch, and knew a lot by heart.
- During his first rendezvous in Vienna, seventeen-year-old Beethoven performed for Mozart. Tradition says that Wolfgang Amadeus was delighted with the art of the young man and predicted a great future for him.
- Parsing Interesting Facts from Beethoven's life, children should know that the future great composer received bad grades. eminent organist and music teacher I.G. Albrechtsberger, tired of struggling with the gloomy motives of the obstinate student, doubted his talent and “printed” with the following words: “I guess this dumbass will never learn anything!”
- During Beethoven's youth, the piano was not yet as widespread as it was a few decades later. But the great composer was also a prophet. Many of his pieces, including the sonata "For Elise", were written specifically for this instrument.
- Beethoven was a brilliant improviser. His contemporary, I.B. Cramer once briefly but succinctly remarked that anyone who has never heard a pianist "naughty" has no idea about improvisation.
- His favorite drink was coffee. Getting down to cooking, each time the musician meticulously counted 64 grains - no less and no more.
- The character of the composer was very difficult, and sometimes grumpy. One day, during public speaking, a certain young man began to talk enthusiastically with his lady. The musician immediately stopped playing and exclaimed in anger: “I will not perform in front of such pigs!”. Despite persuasion and apology, he refused to continue playing.
- But the pianist's friends noted his friendliness, good nature and excellent sense of humor. Beethoven liked to sit with friends in a pub called "At the Swan". Once he did not come for several days in a row. When one of his comrades asked if he was ill, the musician cheerfully replied: “I am healthy, but my only boots fell ill with such a terrible fever that they almost gave their soul to God.”
- Facts from the biography of Ludwig van Beethoven say that he had very complicated relationship with women. Some admired his genius, others thought he was "ugly, ill-mannered and obnoxious." One of the ladies courted by the pianist was horrified by him. In an intimate conversation with friends, she called him half crazy.
- The wayward genius once almost destroyed one of his best works. Having written a romance, he decided to burn it. From destiny" dead souls”he was saved by a certain official Bart, who had a wonderful tenor. Glancing at the composer and seeing that he was about to throw the notes into the fire, he snatched them from his hands. Bart then sat down at the instrument and performed the romance. Beethoven unexpectedly liked it and he graciously agreed to leave his offspring “alive”. Thus the magnificent romance "Adelaide" was saved.
- Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony when he was already completely deaf.
- At first, the musician carefully concealed his hearing loss. Once, while conducting an orchestra, he did not turn his face to the audience - he simply did not hear the applause. One can imagine all the drama of the moment for Beethoven when he was delicately turned to the audience.
- The musician did not like to give piano lessons. The only exceptions were gifted students and attractive young women.
- Beethoven died at the age of 56. AT last way he was seen off by close friends and thousands of fans of his brilliant work.
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Without a doubt, creative people are very different from most. They seem to live in another world, in another universe. And their ingenuity and originality are amazing and cause others to ask: “How? How did they come up with this?”
1. Creative people are constantly in the clouds.
If you watch them in a noisy company, where everyone communicates and has fun, they will sit in the corner of the room, write something, draw, think about something. At school, such children may daydream in a geometry lesson while Maria Ivanovna explains the Pythagorean theorem. They often go into themselves, forgetting about everything in the world, and it is at such moments that brilliant thoughts are born in their head.
2. They are good observers and are good at analyzing what is going on around them.
Anything can serve as a source of new ideas for them: landscapes, buildings, elements of clothing or decor. Clinging to some trifle, such people will create a masterpiece, turn a word into a whole story.
3. There is no daily routine
Waking up at 7, having lunch at noon, having an afternoon snack at 16, having dinner at 19 and going to bed at 22 is definitely not the lot of creative people. They will work when they want, eat when the opportunity arises (or forget about it altogether), and will sleep on anything and in any way they like, even at a desk.
4. They love privacy
Many are afraid of loneliness, but not creative creations. For them, this is a way to hide from the aggression of the outside world, from the formalities that prevail in society. Left alone with themselves, knowing that no one will disturb or drive away their muse, creative personalities can enjoy the present in peace.
5. They always want to try something new.
Routine - what is it? Creative people have never heard of this. The monotonous rhythm of life - "work - home - sleep" - the worst thing that can happen to them. They need adrenaline, they need movement, new emotions.
6. They are not afraid to take risks.
To come up with something new, sometimes you need to do unexpected things, put everything on the line. Whatever it is: work, personal life. It is impossible to create something unusual without taking risks.
7. For them, failures and misses are a huge motivation.
Life as we know it black and white stripes. Behind incredible success a grand failure may follow. All ingenious inventors and artists someday have doubts, they are mistaken. But, if others would abandon the case halfway, without seeing intelligible results, creative people will not leave everything so easily. Of course, perseverance is characteristic not only of non-standard-minded individuals, but for the latter this quality is very important.
8. They do what inspires them.
The most important thing for creative people is to do what they really like. They don't need any recognition. And they will not come up with something from under the stick either. The freedom to create everything new and new, to work better and better - this is happiness.
9. Creative people often put themselves in the shoes of others.
After all, it's so interesting - to know someone else's philosophy, to look at the world from a different point of view. For a moment, starting to think like another person is a great way to develop yourself, as well as learn to understand others.
10. They notice everything.
These people have the ability to connect parts into a single whole. They see what others do not see, and use their observations to better understand the essence of this or that phenomenon.
Without such people, the world would be more boring and dreary. Creative individuals encourage us to develop, change us in better side. To say that they are 100% different from "uncreative" is wrong - they just have a desire to create something new. And everyone can and should be original and try to invent the uninvented.
Until the mid 1950s. science paid little attention to creativity. Then one researcher checked over 121,000 titles of papers recorded in Abstracts of Papers in Psychology over the past 23 years.
He found that just 186 articles - less than 0.2% of total articles - had anything to do with creativity. Since then, interest in creativity has increased significantly, and many books have been published on the subject3. Scientists have studied the lives of successful creative individuals, investigated the creative process and tested creativity under every conceivable condition and for every age group.
The efforts of researchers have helped us deepen our understanding of creativity and get rid of misconceptions that have been beyond criticism for a long time. Of course, some of these misconceptions have touched you as well, and therefore you have developed some false ideas about what creativity is and how it "works." To replace these misconceptions with facts is the first important step in developing their creative potential. The facts discussed below are the most important. We briefly mentioned a few in Lesson 1. All of them deserve to be returned to and considered from time to time.
"Doing Your Own Thing" Is Not Necessarily a Sign of Creativity
“For many people,” notes George F. Keller, “being a creative person seems to mean nothing more than releasing impulses or relieving tension ... However, unrestrained jerking of the hips is hardly a creative dance, like the flashy colors on the canvas - creative painting. Yes, creativity includes a willingness to break with established patterns and try new directions, but it doesn't mean being different for the sake of being different or indulging your own weaknesses. It is equally wrong to ignore accumulated knowledge of the past as it is to be limited by it. As Alfred Whitehead warned: “Fools operate on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination.” Being creative means combining knowledge and imagination.
(Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) - British mathematician and philosopher.]
Creativity does not require special intellectual talent or high IQ
The idea has been universally accepted for centuries that extremely creative people have some special intellectual abilities that are absent in the general population. When the IQ test was invented, this idea got new life; it was believed that anyone who did not reach the result of the "threshold of genius" (135 and above) had almost no hope of intellectual achievement.
However, when researchers began studying the lives of creative people and comparing IQ test scores with creativity test scores, they made two discoveries. They found that creativity does not depend on having specific talents, but on using talents that almost all people have, but most people have never learned to use. In addition, they found that the IQ test was not designed to measure creativity, so a high score is not a sign of creativity, and a low score is a sign of lack of creativity. In fact, they found that the vast majority of successful creatives were well below the “genius threshold.”
Drug use hinders creativity
Although many people will obviously deny this fact, it has long been confirmed by those who study creativity. If alcohol and drugs are such a boon to original thought, one researcher asks, why hasn't the tavern around the corner produced more successful creatives? No one has yet been able to satisfactorily answer this question. And he's unlikely to answer. The reason drugs harm creativity, explains Brewster Gieselin, is that "their action reduces judgment, and the actions they provoke are hallucinatory rather than illuminating." He argues that what is needed is not artificial stimulation of thinking, but enhanced control and management.
The use of drugs and alcohol as stimulants is sometimes part of a larger delusion that can be called bohemian mystique. This fallacy consists in the idea that a dispersed lifestyle removes intellectual limitations and opens the mind to new ideas. Eliot Dole Hutchinson offers an assessment that most researchers would agree with: “Narrow streets, squalid little rooms, undisciplined living and local artistic hype - all this can take place in a pseudo-artistic life, but it has nothing to do with genuine creation. Just as the necessary creative freedom that is often associated with them has nothing to do with it ... The Bohemian way of life squanders its freedom, returns after hours of absent-mindedness less efficient. Creative discipline benefits from its leisure, returns rested, inspired, energetic.
Creativity is an expression of mental health
One common image of the creative person is promoted in a number of low-budget horror films. This image depicts a mad scientist with a crazy look, nervously scurrying around the laboratory, rubbing his hands insidiously and muttering nonsense. Many people do believe in this image: they believe that creative person and a mentally ill person are almost synonymous. They are delusional.
In the next paragraph, Harold H. Anderson summarizes the dominant view in psychology about the relative mental health of creative people. (This view was shared by such respected scholars as Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, J. P. Gilford, and Ernest Hilgard.)
There is a consensus among these authors that creativity is an expression of a mentally and psychologically healthy personality, that creativity is associated with usefulness, harmony, honesty, integrity, personal involvement, enthusiasm, high motivation and activity.
There is also agreement that neurosis either accompanies a decrease in the quality of the creative abilities of the individual, or causes it. Concerning neurotics and people with other forms of mental illness [who are at the same time creative people], the following assumptions are made: that these people are creative in spite of their illness; that their performance is below what they would have achieved without the disease; that they are degrading; or that they are pseudo-creative people, i.e. that they can be shiny original ideas which, owing to neurosis, they cannot communicate.
While creativity helps human society thrive, science offers few answers to how it really works endlessly complex concept. No matter how much research is being done in measuring and comprehending a significant phenomenon, it seems as if there are more questions than real answers. Theories and results are also sometimes in conflict with each other, meaning that every "fact" presented now could have been rejected in its time. But it's okay to study what seems almost completely inexplicable.
Stress kills creativity
Just like how it kills mental health, the heart, and pretty much everything else. Stress has a negative effect on creative expression, especially when limited by rigid deadlines and criteria. According to psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, some people lack a gene or some other factor that predisposes them to creativity (this perspective is apparently disputed). External factors, such as stress, influence the emergence of new ideas much more than any internal ones.
Geniuses describe their creative processes as if they were in a trance.
Dr. Nancy Andreesen, who wrote "The Brain of Creation": Geniuses of neuroscience may not be able to scientific point to explain how they appear creative potential and genius, but they really know how they inspire and influence great thinkers. All people experience moments of "normal creativity" that arise in daily tasks. But artists, composers, scientists, authors, and others who are considered geniuses tend to talk about dreamy "flashes" that highlight their most famous, iconic works.
Link between dopamine production and creativity may exist
Because dopamine rises with approval and other rewards, some neuroscientists (like Dr. David Switt) believe it also aligns easily with creativity. Getting money, or the simple satisfaction of a job well done, can stimulate levels of innovation and natural dopamine. Such a connection exists only as a theory, although the fact that it really has great importance in explanation is sometimes inexplicable.
Perception is the first step to sustaining the creative spark
Everybody creative pursuits begin when the thinker senses an external stimulus and processes it in his mind. More complex than just vision, the "engines of our ingenuity" connect images with imagination. Personal differences in this inevitable connection lead to creativity and easily explain why some people end up with special results, they help society move forward (develop).
Creativity can be aligned with brain structure and chemistry
Theories about true origin creativity abounds, and some think that ability can be determined by brain chemistry and structure. Rex Young University of New Mexico believes that if you have fewer certain neurological phenomena, you're better off when it comes to being creative. A lower dosage of a certain chemical composition, weaker white matter and the area of the frontal cortex is thinner. Interestingly, the brains previously tested for verification mental abilities, show the composition of the complete opposite.
Creative thinkers have weaker nerves
During creative moments the left frontal cortex experiences comparatively more sluggish activity, which is also consistent with the aforementioned reduced white matter and connecting axons. Unlike intelligence, creativity tends to thrive when thinking slows down, although "flashes" of inspiration and insight come at the speed of flashes. Also emotions and some cognitive processes take place in this special zone, which scientists like Dr. Jung believe encourages novelty and abstraction of thought processes.
"Psychological distance" promotes creativity
When faced with a creative hurdle, the best thing thinkers can do for themselves is to step aside and try to look at things from a completely different perspective. Research has shown that the most consistently creative people show a willingness to approach problems with different parties far beyond their original goals. Appreciating some gap between the original point of view and newer ones contributes to abstract thinking, as the most important component in the inventive process.
Early research on creativity divided it into three subsections
The exploration of creativity by Mel Rhodes - who examined about 50 people - ultimately forced him to divide everything into human, process, and environmental components. The human element, as you can probably imagine, suggests a unique set of characteristics necessary to think and feel things in a new, abstract way. In fact, understanding and formulating ideas and results as a known process, Environment means the internal and external environment in which the creative person works.
Aerobic exercise increases creativity
When the brain starts to fog up, try aerobics to get rid of it. In a 2005 study, researchers at Rhode Island College noted that two hours after engaging in such physical activity, some were the most mentally active. They used the Torrance Creative Thinking Test to measure how well participants performed on tasks given exercise and without them.
Creativity is lost if it becomes a vehicle for rewards.
Although since 1987, the results of this study only demonstrate how incomprehensibly the true face of creativity these days, they are at odds with some more modern theories despite having the same meaning. Tests conducted at Brandeis University on student writers showed them immersed in motivation and thoughts about receiving awards for their work and efforts. They took less interest in poetry, which was a discovery that referred to a non-creative situation.
Improvisation stimulates the language centers of the brain
FMRIs and improvised jazz first allowed surgeon Charles Limba to display creative process. In his TEDxMidAtlantic lecture, he talked about his fascinating results regarding physiology during musical improvisation, in particular, as Paul Broca's light does on US Independence Day. The brain, according to scientists, is the part that is responsible for language development and cognition, meaning that one of the body's most essential organs might recognize music (and perhaps even other expressive pursuits) as akin to speech.
Bilingual and multilingual can improve their creative skills
Researchers have "perhaps a moment of discovery" when it comes to proving the connection between bilingualism and multilingualism, but strong evidence for this certainly exists. Individuals able to speak more than one language in general, display more competent multi-tasking skills and improved cognition tend to highlight key components in creativity. Most impressive, however, is that they are better able to analyze situations and causes with different points view, which indicates the need for attempts to define creativity.
Creative people are more likely to be dishonest
This does not mean that all creative people cannot be trusted and that their opposites are always the most honest people. But people who are capable of newer and more abstract thoughts and who have more flexible moral principles "enjoy" more high risk deserving less confidence in their behavior. Numerous studies show that being able to concoct more durable, viable stories encourages viewing scripts from different angles about getting caught.
High IQ and creativity may correlate with each other
Harvard, like many other institutions higher education, hopes to discover the unusual secrets of creativity. Dr. Shelley Carson, who is developing a new standard for measuring a mysterious phenomenon, wants to try to find a connection between intelligence and creative thinking. Some of her earlier research notes that there is a combined increase of 120, 130, and 150 IQ levels, but more research is needed to prove this relationship.
So creativity and mental illness can overlap
All creative personalities, like crazy ones - in particular, influential and brilliant ones - have always been and probably always will be models that have some signs. Their brains have been shown to be more open to external sources and has more memory than others, but this leads to some undesirable side effects. Overexcitation can cause (or worsen) anxiety and depression.
