Ludwig van Beethoven is renowned for having moved house dozens of times during his life. He changed address extraordinarily frequently, even by the standards of a period in which people moved house far more often than is usual nowadays. As far as his choice of accommodation was concerned, the composer was not a “regular” in the city proper or any given suburb, although he evidently did prefer some areas of Vienna over others.
From the late 1810s onwards, Beethoven had several spells living in the area that is now the Landstrasse district, and all his homes in that part of the city are within a few hundred meters of each other. He composed two piano sonatas in two apartments on the suburb's main street, which runs out of Vienna to the south-east. He worked on the 9th Symphony, which he completed in the spring of 1824, in an apartment at what is now Ungargasse 5. The apartment was very close to a salon run by the Streicher piano company.
created in 1823/24, when Beethoven also lived at Ungargasse 5
composed between 1817 and 1819, when Beethoven was also staying at Landstrasser Hauptstrasse 26.
Rents for apartments in the suburbs were at least a third cheaper than similarly-sized properties in the city proper. As rule, the closer you were to today's city centre, the more you would have to pay in rent. Apartments were advertised in notices and classified advertisements, as well as by word of mouth. For example, a classified advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung announced that “two apartments were available to rent, one of which is on the first floor and is comprised of two bedrooms, an anteroom, a kitchen, hallway and a wood store” in Landstrasse, which at that time was just outside Vienna. The description suggests that this property was bigger than the typical apartment you might find in the suburbs or outside the city limits, which usually had one bedroom and a kitchen. It was very common to see accommodation advertised as “ready to move in at Michaelmas” – a Catholic holiday which falls at the end of September and was the most popular time to move house apart from the period around St George's Day at the end of April.
“Over a number of years now, the police have been in a state of considerable despair during the periods when people need to vacate their accommodation (which, in these parts, correspond to the fourteen days after St George's Day and Michaelmas, respectively), as they struggle to put roofs over the heads of several hundred families from the poorer class, even in the furthest-flung of the towns and villages outside the city... To alleviate the shortage of housing, building has re-started all over the place… In the suburbs, some of the empty spaces adjacent to the Line Wall are being built upon. In some places, attractive, comfortable dwellings are being built where gardens, barns and stables used to stand.”
Johann Pezzl: Neue Skizze von Wien (New Sketch of Vienna), 1805, p. 9–10.
“The main street in this suburb is one of the widest in all Vienna, largely paved and, like the other two main thoroughfares… lined on both sides with palaces and outstanding buildings. The rest of the streets are similarly appointed, featuring beautiful houses and benefitting from ample lighting at night.”
Joseph von Fink: Der magistratische Vorstadt-Grund Landstraße (The Magistrate’s Suburb of Landstrasse), 1831, p. 5.
In the early 19th century, the suburb of Landstrasse still took in some large and undeveloped green spaces – spaces many nobles chose for their summer palaces. One noble to build in Landstrasse was Beethoven's benefactor Prince Andrei Kirillovich Razumovsky, who constructed his palace there in 1806 and 1807. Razumovsky also maintained the Schuppanzigh Quartet, one of Vienna’s first professional string quartets. Beethoven dedicated his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies to Razumovsky.
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Beethoven Museum – Wien Museum