Beethoven and the Illuminati - How the secret order influenced the great composer

inspired by an interesting article:

www.slate.com...

In 1779, a composer, writer, teacher, and dreamer named Christian Neefe arrived in Bonn, Germany, to work for the Electoral Court.

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One of Neefe's first students was a sullen, grubby, taciturn 10-year-old keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven. He was the son of an alcoholic singer who had more or less beat music into him.

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In those years, his first serious mentor, Neefe the Schwärmer, was in an especially perfervid phase of his spiritual life. For some time he had been a Freemason, a group then in its first century as a progressive, international, secular, semisecret order open to men of all faiths. (As such, the Masons were loathed by churches and regimes alike.) But Neefe was tired of the Masons' endless chatter of liberty and morality. He wanted a more ambitious and active kind of brotherhood—say, a new world order. That took him to one of the more bizarre sideshows of the Enlightenment: the Bavarian Illuminati. A Bonn lodge of the Illuminati formed, and Beethoven's teacher became head of it.

The article goes on to state that Beethoven probably did not join the order himself, because it ceased to exist (I suppose that could be debated around here) around the time he was 14. Regardless of whether or not Beethoven himself was in any type of secret order, it's almost certain that he was heavily influenced by them - either unconscious or intentional.

I read this article a while back. Very interesting..I just dug up this thread because I was going to post one of my own and wanted to make sure someone hadn't posted it already, so there you are.

A lot of this truly makes sense because the idols espoused in the 9th symphony were very masonic. And being a big fan of Beethoven I know that he had that Schiller Ode to Joy poem on his mind since at least the Bonn years when he was still a teenager and was throughout his life looking for an opportunity to set it to music, which he finally did in the 9th symphony.
It makes one wonder though how deep Beethoven was entrenched in the illuminati world though and whether it was partially the reason for his success, i.e. friends in high places.