Final Illness
Beethoven suffered declining health throughout the last years of his life, including the so-called "Late period" when he produced some of his most admired work. The last work he was able to complete was the substitute final movement of the String Quartet No. 13, deemed necessary to replace the difficult Große Fuge. Shortly thereafter, in December 1826, illness struck again, with episodes of vomiting and diarrhea that nearly ended his life.
As it became apparent that Beethoven would not recover, his friends gathered to help and to pay their final respects. Beethoven's doctors conducted four minor operations to relieve ascites (abdominal swelling), of which the first resulted in infection, the others not. On 24 March he was given his last rites, and on 26 March he slipped into unconsciousness and died. While others, including Beethoven's brother and some friends, were probably in the house, Hüttenbrenner reports in his 1860 account that only he and Beethoven's sister-in-law were present in the room at the time of death.
Read more about this topic: Death Of Ludwig Van Beethoven
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or illness:
“Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces—in the beginning, there was spice.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)