Beethoven as a Black Composer

Abstract

Perhaps it was late in the 1960s when Charlie Brown's diminutive pianist, on hearing unequivocally that Beethoven was black, exclaimed, I've been playing soul music all my life and didn't know it! question of Beethoven's African ancestry has been raised at various times. If the story reached the comic strips, where did it begin? I do not recall when I first heard the story, but I knew that Beethoven's forebears were Flemish and that that region had become Spanish when Joan The Mad married the Hapsburg Philip I. During the sixteenth century, Spain carried its inquisition into the area, where neither the Protestant nor Catholic inhabitants really wanted to benefit from Spain's church-state union. But perhaps an ancestor of Beethoven's was Spanish. That would open the door for African background. Africa was firmly entrenched in Spain well before 711 A.D., when the Islamic chapter of Spanish history begins. There was no wall separating Africa from Spain, such as the 11,000-foot Pyrennes mountain range that defines the Franco-Spanish border. Strait of Gibraltar is only a few miles wide, and in much earlier times, there was not even water separating the area. A few instances of relationships follow. About 250 B.C. Spain was the site for Carthaginian trade in the Mediterranean and the source for much of the Carthaginian armies until 201 B.C., when the second Punic War put Spain under Roman control. Vandal king, Gaiseric, accepted an invitation to establish a Vandal kingdom at Carthage in 428 A.D., which was accomplished by his 80,000 subjects. During the time of the Moslems (politically until 1492, although the culture and the language were of permanent influence in Spain), there were some Arabs and Syrians in Spain, but most of the new citizens were Berbers from Africa. Between times of political and religious conflict, there was trade, as well as intermarriage between the Spanish and Moors. These relationships are confirmed by the celebrated cantigas of Alfonso X el Sabio (king of Castile and Le6n from 1250 to 1284) and the slave-singers in the Moslem courts of Abd-er-Rahman III (912-961) and Almanzor (978-1002). And when the Moors were gone, we find