Beethoven was born 250 years ago. To mark the approaching anniversary, we asked musicologist Sándor Kovács, head of the Doctoral School of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, to give us a truthful and detailed portrait of Beethoven, most often described in anecdotes as morose and deaf.

In May 1799, Baroness Anna Seeberg and her daughters left Budapest for Vienna to take piano lessons from Ludwig van Beethoven, the 29-year-old up-and-coming artist of the day. The innocent trip resulted in lifelong friendships and a fatal love affair. Dr Judith Bajzáth, head of the visitors centre at the Agricultural Research Centre, talks about the details.

'An account of a very remarkable young musician', says the table of contents of a six hundred page book published in 1781. The english edition of Miscellanies, among studies on various topics such as the periodical appearance and disappearance of certain birds, the possibilities of accessing the arctic, as well as ancient tragedies, also contains one of the most important documents on Mozart's wunderkind years.

Liszt Prize-winning pianist Kálmán Dráfi believes that anyone who can give an excellent performance of Bartók can play almost anything else and that therefore one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century ought to receive a higher stature in the repertoires of Hungarian pianists. A department head at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Dráfi is a member of the jury for the Bartók World Competition, which is expected to decide late Saturday night who wins this year’s piano category.

The jury for this year’s Bartók World Competition is headed by Kenji Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known pianists, who is also noted for his authentic interpretations of Liszt and Bartók. Currently a lecturer at the Tokyo University of the Arts, he studied at the Liszt Academy in the 1980s, where he learned to speak Hungarian, and he believes that his command of the language has helped him a great deal to uncover the inner logic of Bartók’s musical world.