Born in Bonn, having an awful lot of works, Beethoven, this phenomenal composer leads a miserable life. Misfortunes lead him into bipolar disorder.
Famous people are famous because they have gone through many that others cannot. So did Beethoven. His father treated him harshly to turn him into a child prodigy. Never married, he was once engaged in two love affairs but was refused. And his ear became deaf in his late twenties. Financially unstable, he shifted from place to place in Vienna. Once he was a pious believer of Napoleon, but the dictator’s declaiming King crushed his illusion. And later in life, his nephew broke up with him, breaking his heart once and for all. All these made him suffer from bipolar disorder later in life.
When torturing by deafness, he wrote in his letters “I joyfully hasten to meet death,” “… for will it not deliver me from endless suffering?” And an 1801 letter to a friend indicated correspondingly his two-year-long depression. The next year he is begging mercy for the Mighty God for “but one more day of pure joy.” In 1813, he may have tried to commit suicide, disappeared and been found three days later. In 1816, he wrote: “During the last six weeks my health has been so shaky, so that I often think of death, but without fear …”
But suffering from bipolar disorder is not always a misfortune. It has good aspect as well; at least it is the case with Beethoven because bipolar disorder can feel happy without reason, even if it is in the face of misfortune. It may be this reason that Beethoven survived as a creator.