On foot. I despise being cramped.

To the first question, most certainly, and to the second, composition.

Karl's...ah.

And Heiligenstadt, 1802.

I choose 1800-1810, give or take a few years; it was then that I embarked on my "new path" and vowed to care little for traditional constraints on composition. My musical /style/ has not remained consistent since, nor has it ever, but my philosophy on it began in the late 1790s. That decade...did much to shape my personality (it was also around that time that I was forced out of denial, in terms of that Certain Infirmity.)

Well.

The 1820s are not a good time to require surgery, especially if one is in their fifties, and of notoriously bad health to begin with.

Oh Christ, I have a hearty helping of both.

"GENAU!"

To myself. I am very vocal while writing. "Exactly" is the literal translation, but it equates more to "HELL yeah!"

Not a clue, at the moment. I am a composer, Herr Stark. I figure out how to answer this question, and then get paid for it.

I am reading these words, but I don't understand. I HAVE dropped my spectacles in the piano...perhaps I misread...

I was a member of the electoral orchestra at Bonn. That job itself was not bad at all, only busy. But when I was...eighteen, perhaps, the orchestra was to tour down the river.

Being not only the youngest member, but also first violist (classical musicians will know the significance!), I was appointed kitchen scullion. And THAT is something I should not like to repeat.

I am constantly ill, and occasionally bedridden. I am also restless and stubborn. It is not a good combination.

I don't...hm.

Nanette Streicher, probably. Good woman.

Orpheus and Eurydice.

Strange looking things. Strange looking, burnt things.

Indeed not.

No musicians of questionable sanity here, no...

Schiller. And Goethe. I have holed myself up with their work for the moment.

Yes...and no. *irritable* I have asked Stephen von Breuning to tie me to the mast, as it were; I do not trust myself to leave the flat in this state.

(( Gounooooood! Enjoy! :D ))

i see a void and i ought not to see a void for god's sake i have been so productive and now i cannot, there is music screaming and yet my mind is in disarray and i am denied even the releif of getting it down on paper and i feel as if...as if i may implode, meanwhile i have been sitting staring at the wall and damn everything i would much rather hide away and keep alone right now. but that kind of isolation is one i keep accidentally making more permanent than it should be and it will be the same as always, i will say unspeakable things and go grovelling for forgiveness, so perhaps i am right in this isolation, to not inflict this nonsense on anyone but god knows i cannot do that and i now i do not even know what i am saying, i do not, i do not want to BE HERE

(( I don't really know if I intended this to be Ludwig talking a mile a minute, or more to reflect his style of letter writing. Whichever. Just recently realized I haven't really written him in one of his REALLY bad states. ))

I am...in a dark place right now.