... Electorate of Cologne, which had its seat at Bonn. The composer's grandfather, Ludwig (Louis) van Beethoven (1712-73), the son of an enterprising burgher of Mechelen (Belgium), was a trained musician with a fine bass voice, and after positions at Mechelen, Leuven and Liège accepted in 1733 an appointment as bass in the electoral chapel at Bonn. In 1761 he was appointed Kapellmeister, a position which - although he seems not to have been a composer, unlike other occupants of such a post - carried with it the responsibility of supervising the musical establishment of the court. With his wife Maria Josepha Poll, whom he had married in 1733, and who later took to drink, he had only one child that survived. Johann van Beethoven (c1740-1792) was a lesser man than his father. He, too, entered the elector's service, first as a boy soprano in 1752, and continuing after adolescence as a ...

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