BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Monday, January 13, 1823 (approximately)

The obituaries section of the Wiener Zeitung, usually fairly short, perhaps half a column, during this week suddenly gets much larger and fills almost an entire page, even though most of the deceased get only a line or two to mark their passings. This seems to have been a particularly nasty winter season for disease in pre-antibiotics Vienna.