Which Composer Had the Worst Childhood?

by Emily F. Hogstad, Interlude

It’s not easy to be a composer, and many have had dramatic lives full of pain and struggle.

But some composers have had worse times than others, especially in their vulnerable childhood years.

Today we’re looking at five composers who had particularly difficult childhoods.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler as a child

Gustav Mahler struggled with three major issues during his childhood and adolescence.

First, he came from an impoverished background. (His grandmother had actually been a street peddler.) His father began his career as a coachman and ultimately became an innkeeper. But the large Mahler family never felt financially comfortable.

They were also Jewish, which made them minorities in Bohemia. As a result, Gustav always felt like an outsider within broader Austrian cultural life.

Finally, Gustav’s mother gave birth to fourteen children over the course of her life, and half of them died young.

The timeline is devastating: Gustav watched younger siblings die in 1865, 1871 (two brothers died on the same day in December), 1873, 1874, 1875, and 1881. This series of losses led to an understandable obsession with fate and death.

The consequences of these traumas turned out to be far-reaching, both personally and professionally. All are echoed in the music that he wrote as an adult decades later. 

Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven at 13 years old

Ludwig van Beethoven came from a musical family.

His paternal grandfather was also named Ludwig. Ludwig the Elder had grown up in destitution. Fortunately, his raw musical talent got him noticed by the Prince-elector Clemens August of Bavaria, whose court was in Bonn. By 1761, Beethoven’s grandfather became Kapellmeister there.

Ludwig the Elder’s youngest son was Johann, born around 1740. Johann inherited his father’s musical talent and also worked in the Bonn court.

In 1767, Johann married a young widow named Maria. Together they had three children who lived to adulthood, the eldest of whom was Ludwig van Beethoven.

From an early age, it was clear that little Ludwig was extremely musically talented. Johann decided he wanted to train him and make money off of him. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father had recently gone on tour across Europe, showcasing his children’s prodigious talent, and Johann considered doing the same with Ludwig.

Unfortunately, Johann struggled with severe alcohol addiction. Johann would drag Ludwig out of bed in the middle of the night and force him to perform for his drinking buddies all night long. He was also abusive, beating Ludwig or locking him into the cellar if he didn’t practice enough.

This was all bad enough, but Ludwig’s beloved mother Maria died in 1787, when he was just sixteen.

Johann’s drinking problem had led him to neglect his job, and responsibility for supporting the household was placed on the son’s shoulders.

In 1789, the situation got so bad that Ludwig had to petition for half of Johann’s paycheck to be sent directly to him, just so that his father wouldn’t spend it all on alcohol.

In 1792, when he was eighteen, Ludwig left his dysfunctional childhood home in Bonn to make a name for himself in Vienna. Not long after he left, he got word that his father had died.

The stormy personality that Ludwig developed during his long abusive childhood endured…and, arguably, appeared in his music for years to come. 

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Ambrosius Bach, J.S. Bach’s father

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in March 1685, the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach and his wife Maria. Johann Ambrosius was director of the town musicians in Johann Sebastian’s birthplace of Eisenach and was likely Johann Sebastian’s first teacher.

Not a lot of documentation exists about Bach’s childhood, but we know enough to extrapolate that it was a difficult one. His first major loss came when his mother died in the spring of 1694, just a few weeks after Johann turned nine years old.

Johann Ambrosius needed a wife to help him raise his children, and six months later, he married his second wife. But in February 1695, Johann Ambrosius died, too. Johann Sebastian was now nine years old and an orphan.

After this horrifying year, Johann Sebastian moved in with his oldest brother, Johann Christoph.

Johann Christoph became another one of Johann Sebastian’s early keyboard teachers. The brothers lived together for five years, and then, as a teenager, Johann Sebastian moved out to join the choir of St. Michael’s Convent in Lüneburg.

Around the time that he left, Johann Sebastian composed a Capriccio dedicated to his eldest brother. It’s now known as BWV 993.

Joseph Haydn

Haydn in London

Joseph Haydn was born in the small town of Rohrau, Austria, in 1732, the second of twelve children.

His father was a wheelwright by day and amateur singer by night. Young Joseph soaked up the music around him like a sponge.

His idyllic childhood was shattered when he was six years old. A distant relative named Johann Matthias Frankh, a schoolmaster and choirmaster, came to visit and noticed Joseph’s musical talent. He proposed that he take Joseph away with him as his apprentice. Haydn’s parents agreed. Tragically, however, once he arrived in the Frankh household, little Haydn was starved and beaten.

The following year, yet another traveling musician noticed Joseph’s talent. His name was Georg von Reutter, and he was in charge of selecting boys for the choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. So in the spring of 1740, at the age of just eight, Haydn arrived in Vienna to be trained as a professional musician.

Haydn’s life at the cathedral was difficult. His general education was less thorough than he would have liked, and he still had trouble securing enough food. He was relieved whenever he was invited to aristocratic parties to sing, because at least he could eat there.

However, he was acutely aware he couldn’t stay at the Cathedral forever. His voice began to break in 1749, the year he turned seventeen. Apparently the Empress referred to his singing as “crowing.”

Around the same time, a prank during which he snipped off the pigtail of a fellow chorister went wrong. The choirmaster threatened to cane him for insubordination. Haydn responded that he’d rather leave the choir than be hit. He ended up on the streets of Vienna both beaten and fired, with nothing to his name. For all intents and purposes, his childhood was over. 

Clara Wieck, 1828

Clara Wieck Schumann was born in September 1819 in Leipzig to an ambitious piano teacher named Friedrich and his singer/pianist wife Mariane.

Friedrich desperately wanted a child who he could use to experiment on pedagogically, and use as an advertisement for his methods. Friedrich chose Clara to be his golden child.

Unfortunately, around the same time, the Wiecks’ marriage fell apart. Mariane couldn’t handle Friedrich’s controlling nature and embarked on an affair with Friedrich’s best friend. The two were divorced.

Clara stayed with her mother as a toddler, but once she turned five, Friedrich exercised his custody rights. From that point forward, he would have free rein with her.

He taught her piano, violin, and voice, as well as theory subjects like counterpoint and harmony. She was also taught languages because Wieck believed fluency in multiple languages would ease her path as a professional touring virtuoso.

Underlining his attitude of ownership toward her, Friedrich kept a joint diary with Clara in which he sometimes wrote entries from her point of view. This behavior demonstrated a deeply unnerving level of what a modern observer might call enmeshment.

In 1828, at a salon concert, she met an up-and-coming pianist named Robert Schumann. She was nine and he was eighteen. Schumann was so impressed by her training that he signed up to study under Friedrich. Friedrich’s plan was working as intended.

Clara toured throughout Europe as a child. She was a continent-wide sensation, celebrated not only for her playing but also for her compositions.

Disaster struck in her teens when she fell in love with Robert, inciting a family civil war. Her efforts in her teens to assert her independence and to extract herself from Friedrich’s sphere of influence proved to be incredibly challenging. She had to fight in the courts to make sure that Friedrich would not take away the money she’d earned…and to win the right to marry Robert without Friedrich’s permission.

Although the legal battles were deeply traumatising, she emerged victorious. After all of the heartbreak and trauma of her youth, she ended up becoming one of the greatest, most influential musicians of the nineteenth century.