Ludwig van Beethoven received lessons on the piano and the violin from an early age, driven by the ambitions of his less successful and strict musician father, Johann van Beethoven. Johann wanted to turn his gifted son into another Mozart, and to that end he occasionally made him practice in the middle of the night. The art of improvisation, which the young Beethoven quickly discovered for himself, was not to his father’s taste.
“I noticed here and there a man who after I had improvised for an evening would write down some of my peculiarities and make boast of them the next day. Foreseeing that these things would soon appear in print, I made up my mind to pre-empt them.”
