Though this is the element of his life that often receives an abundance of attention, however, it is relatively insignificant in the light of the enormity of Beethoven's talent as a musician and composer, and the influence that he wielded not only on the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but truly on the trajectory of Western music as a whole. Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, as the second oldest child of a court musician, and he was quickly recognized as a prodigy by his father (Lane 2006)