From his unhappy love life to when he was actually born - here are the surprising facts about the German classical virtuoso's life. Google is celebrating the th anniversary of legendary German composer Ludwig van Beethoven with one of its famous animated doodles. The musician and composer was born on this day in in Bonn - then part of the Holy Roman Empire - and went on to become one of the most celebrated composers of all time. Beethoven started losing his hearing when he was around 26 years old and by the last decade of his life he was completely deaf. He first fell in love with a young countess called Julie in but could not marry her because he was a commoner. A few years later he met and fell in love with Josephine Brunswick after he began giving her piano lessons in She later married a count who died in and she could not marry Beethoven for fear of losing custody of her aristocratic children.

Alfredo Guevara is a urologist who practices in Nogales, Ariz. In his office there are two busts of Ludwig van Beethoven and one of Abraham Lincoln, along with pictures of both men. I was looking at a bronze death mask of Beethoven balanced on a stack of issues of The Journal of Urology one afternoon last month when the doctor came into his office wearing blue surgical scrubs.

By Peter Lewis for the Daily Mail. Not many great men have been arrested as a tramp. But it happened more than once to Beethoven, because of his slovenly appearance. Such stories encapsulate the problem of understanding him; so great a composer, so impossible and so unhappy a man. Beethoven seems to have lived his whole life over the top.