L. V. Beethoven (jan 1, 1770 – jan 1, 1827)

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Beethoven epitomizes Western art music and the Romantic conception of the artist, based on his troubled personal life and bold approach to composition. He helped shape modern attitudes toward art music, the role of the composer, and the relationship between composer, patron, and audience. His career coincided with the ascendancy of instrumental music, and his central contributions were to instrumental genres, including piano sonatas and concertos, string quartets, and symphonies.

Beethoven's career is typically divided into three periods, corresponding to changes in the musical style of his works and events in his personal life. During the first period, which lasted until he was in his early thirties, Beethoven mastered the Classical style of his model Mozart and of his teacher Haydn, while developing a distinctive voice of his own and gaining fame as a pianist in Vienna and elsewhere,. The middle period, beginning about 1802 and lasting some dozen years, is marked by his increasing loss of hearing and resulting social isolation. During those years, he created his best-known works in the "heroic"style, including the Third Symphony, Fifth Symphony, the "Waldstein"and Äppassionata" piano sonatas, and the Piano Concerto No, 5 Emperor. At the same time, he also produced some more lyrical and reserved pieces, such as teh Fourth Piano Concerto and Sixth Symphony. He experimented with traditional forms and many of his works were initially viewed as unusually long and difficult. In the third period, spanning the last decade of his life, Beethoven's works take on an even more intensely subjective quality. He wrote fewer pieces, most of them long and challenging, including the Ninth Symphony (with its unprecedented choral finale setting of Schiller's Öde to Joy", the Missa solemnis, and six string quartets. Most of Beethoven's late works were not written to please patrons or audiences; instead, he looked inward for inspiration and to posterity for an audience.

Thanks to his elevation to the realm of the "sacred,"Beethoven became the authoritative, at times even the authoritarian, musical symbol of the age. In the words of one self-appointed disciple, Richard Wagner, Beethoven had shown "the only possible way" for music to develop further. Moreover, the diverse origins of the style and attitude exemplified by Beethoven were suppressed and displaced to a more mythological lineage: that of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, the earliest "canonized" composers. The German style was represented as an ünmarked,"or transparent, one that was said to represent "universal" and therefore timeless human values. The values associated with German music increasingly became those by which the music of other nations was also judged and often found wanting.

It is easy to see now why Beethoven has always been "the one to beat." One can sympathize with those who have resisted his authority, which can be done without any loss of belief in his greatness. Even after two centuries, Beethoven is still the model of the universalizing claims of classical music and thus shows his centrality to the musical culture that we have inherited.

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