Beethoven and his contemporaries

During the course of his lifetime, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) established relationships with many of his musical contemporaries. Beethoven was notoriously temperamental, eccentric and difficult to get along with; the history of his many relationships is replete with arguments, misunderstandings, and reconciliations. Beethoven had well-known quarrels with his one-time teachers, Joseph Haydn and Antonio Salieri, with the piano virtuoso and composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and the German composer Carl Maria von Weber. Conversely, he regarded Franz Schubert positively, praising the latter’s compositions. Luigi Cherubini Beethoven met the composer Luigi Cherubini on the latter’s journey to Vienna in 1805. Cherubini, a longtime resident of Paris, was invited to mount a production of his opera Die Tage der Gefahr (or Der Wasserträger) after the success of his 1791 opera Lodoïska, which was staged by Emanuel Schikaneder on 23 March 1803 at the Theater an der Wien. Cherubini’s time in Vienna was generally unhappy, but he did have the opportunity to meet Beethoven. Cherubini was in attendance for the first performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, to which he reacted sneeringly. He als