BeethovenWanderweg - Seine Landschaftsliebe

 On a 15 km route, partly on the Rheinsteig route and well-known long-distance hiking trails, we want to give visitors interested in culture and nature an insight into Beethoven's landscape around 1780 with the help of a landscape mediation system. There was no Drachenburg Castle, Nibelungenhalle or the Grandhotel Petersberg. Stone quarrying was omnipresent and Heisterbach Abbey, with its abbey church, ponds and vineyards, was in full bloom. In the Rhine plain, the villages were small, picturesque or not yet founded and fields and vineyards stretched right up to the Rhine. And on the mountain peaks there were ruins instead of forest inns and small paths led up to them instead of cogwheel railroads. With the Beethoven hiking trail, we take you into the world of the great composer and hiker Ludwig van Beethoven. The markings are for an anticlockwise hike!

Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn and baptized on 17 December 1770. Bonn was Beethoven's birthplace, place of childhood and youth, place of musical training and influence. This formative early and maturing period with many authentic Beethoven places is a unique selling point, as Ludwig got to know his natural surroundings through excursions and hiking trips.

Source: the French composer and music critic Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), who attended the first Beethoven Festival in Bonn in August 1845 and stayed in Königswinter, reported that contemporary witnesses told him that Beethoven often crossed the Rhine in a dinghy to dream and work in the Rhine plain. In order to make these local and natural influences on Beethoven's works visible to visitors and locals, the Bonn Beethoven Jubiläums Gesellschaft mbH initiated a Beethoven tour through Bonn and the Rhein-Sieg district. Twenty-two BTHVN steles were created to link all the places of his youth and to strengthen the city of Bonn as a Beethoven city in the long term. Three steles were installed in the Siebengebirge mountains, describing the life and work of Beethoven at the time in Heisterbach Abbey, on the Petersberg and on the Drachenfels plateau. To ensure that these steles do not stand alone at these certainly prominent locations for Beethoven, these places have been linked by a hiking trail.