To understand Beethoven fully as a musician, it's important to know the story behind the master composer's own turbulent life - his loves and losses, as well as his joys.

Beethoven's family were a powerful influence on him, helping to create both the tension as well as the passion that underlie his greatest works. 

Click through on any of the family pictures below, or use the links in the following introduction into the people closest to Beethoven.

Beethoven was the eldest of three sons of Johann and Maria Magdalena van Beethoven.

An elder brother, Ludwig Maria, died at one week old. Ludwig's two brothers - Caspar Carl and Nikolaus Johann - were followed by two more children - Georg and Margherita - both of whom died in infancy.

Beethoven was born into a musical family of Flemish origin (hence van and not von). His grandfather Ludwig, after whom he was named, was Kapellmeister - the senior musician with responsibility for all musical activities at the court of the Elector. He was a fine bass singer with an aptitude for administration.

It was Kapellmeister Beethoven who moved from Malines in Flanders (today Belgium) to the provincial town of Bonn on the Rhine to take up the position of Kapellmeister. As a sideline he dabbled in the wine trade. The young Ludwig was devoted to him; it was on his grandfather's lap that he first heard the names Händel, Bach, Mozart. He was only three when his grandfather died, and it devastated him. For almost his entire adult life he kept his grandfather's portrait on the wall; it was there when he died 53 years later.

Johann van Beethoven was tenor singer at court, but a report into his capabilities described his voice as " very stale". The reason? He was descending into alcoholism, brought about initially, no doubt, because of the presence of so much wine in his father's house - and the opportunities to consume it. Ludwig came to despise him - once having to go the police station to secure his release after he had been arrested drunk.

Maria Magdalena, Ludwig's mother, did not know how to relate to the remote musical genius who was her son - and her first child to survive. She took him as a young boy to stay with relatives in the Netherlands - and perform for wealthy patrons. She tried to draw close to him; he tried to reciprocate. But they remained distant.

Ludwig was 16 and achieving his long-held ambition to meet and study with Mozart in Vienna, when his father sent word that his mother was near death from consumption. Torn between his musical ambition and duty to his family, he knew he really had no choice. He had to leave Vienna. By the time he returned - four and a half years later - Mozart was dead. It increased his resentment against his mother. Although he described her in a letter as the person who meant more to him than anyone, it was more wish fulfillment than reality.

Ludwig's brother Carl Caspar never came to terms with the musical genius of his elder brother. He was himself a musician of limited talent, at one stage in his life trying to pass off his own mediocre compositions as being by his illustrious brother. Ludwig's relationship with Carl therefore was already fraught, and put almost beyond repair by Ludwig's strident opposition to Carl's choice of wife, Johanna Reiss.

Having failed as a musician, Carl held down a job as clerk in Vienna's exchequer office, succumbing to consumption at the young age of forty one. On his deathbed Carl asked Ludwig to be sole guardian of his only child Karl, accepting that Ludwig's view of his wife Johanna as a deeply immoral woman was correct. But the day before Carl's death, Johanna succeeded in having her name inserted in Carl's will as co-guardian. It was to cause Ludwig - and Johanna - years of pain.

Ludwig's relationship with his other brother, Nikolaus Johann, was similarly fraught, and for largely the same reason. When Ludwig heard that Johann, then living as an apothecary in Linz, intended marrying his housekeeper, Therese Obermayer - a woman with an illegitimate child - he rushed to Linz to try to prevent it. Attempting - and failing - to enlist the help first of the local bishop, then the police, he returned dejected to Vienna. Johann married Therese; to Ludwig's relief, the marriage was childless.

Karl, son of Carl and Johanna, was the only Beethoven of the next generation. He was a frail, sensitive boy - utterly unprepared and unequipped for his uncle's determination to make him a musician. The legal battles for custody of Karl which Ludwig had with Johanna lasted on and off for five years and did irreparable mental damage to the young boy.

Ludwig wanted Karl to see him as a father, forbidding him to see his mother. When Karl on one occasion ran away to be with his mother in defiance of a court order, Ludwig called the police to have him returned. It is no wonder Karl felt oppressed, even destroyed, by his uncle. In 1826, just short of his nineteenth birthday, he attempted suicide. Ludwig was devastated. When Karl, recovered from his gunshot wounds, left to join the army, Ludwig knew his hopes of a Beethoven musician of the next generation were over.

© John Suchet