SHARE
COPY LINK

S

PLAY: Beethoven gets Google birthday game

Thursday is Ludwig van Beethoven's 245th birthday, and Google is celebrating by asking users to re-assemble the legendary composer's works after an accident on the way to the concert hall.

PLAY: Beethoven gets Google birthday game
Image: Google/Screenshot

Hapless Ludwig finds himself in a sticky situation when a horse eats his manuscripts, shredding them into little pieces that you'll have to reassemble into the right order to get Beethoven to the performance on time.

Image: Google/Screenshot

Googlers have picked out some of the Romantic musician's best-known works, including the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, the Moonlight Sonata and Ode to Joy – now the European anthem – for you to play with.

Try out the game here.

Beethoven is one of the most famous composers of all time and his work continues to be performed all over the world.

Born in Bonn in 1770, he moved to Vienna to study with composer Joseph Haydn aged just 21 and became a renowned pianist.

He lived out the rest of his life in Vienna, gradually becoming deaf from his 30s but continuing to compose music despite no longer being able to play in public.

In fact, many of his best-known works come from the final 15 years of his life when he was suffering from serious hearing loss.

Beethoven died in 1827 after a lifetime in which he composed hundreds of different pieces of music, and is remembered today as bridging the gap between the Classical and Romantic periods in western music.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

SHOW COMMENTS