Beethoven 250th Anniversary Stamps

2020 marked many things not worth celebrating but the 250th anniversary of the birth of the maestro Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the ones that was and we were delighted to be asked to produce a special set of stamps for the Post Office commemorating the event.

Backed by an initiative started in his home town of Bonn in Germany called BTHVN2020 (Beethoven signed several of his manuscripts with the shorthand BTHVN) we had access to a variety of material and information to draw from but there was a surprising shortage of variety that would work at the reduced size of a stamp. The challenge here was weaving the visual together so the stamps worked as a collective set of four as well as making them individually interesting and tell the story of this phenomenal talent. For more information on both Beethoven and the BTHVN2020 initiative visit: https://www.bthvn2020.de/en/