Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is the pivot point of Western music. Everything before him is pre-Beethoven; everything after is post-Beethoven. Not because he invented new forms — he didn't — but because he broke the emotional contract that Classical music had with its audience. Haydn and Mozart were servants who wrote for patrons. Beethoven was an artist who wrote for posterity, and he said so, loudly.

He began losing his hearing in his late 20s and was completely deaf for the last decade of his life. He wrote five of his nine symphonies, the last five piano sonatas, and the final string quartets during progressive or total deafness. The Ninth Symphony — with its choral finale, the first use of voices in a symphony — was composed when he couldn't hear a note. He reportedly turned to face the audience at the premiere to see their reaction because he didn't know if they were applauding.

The late string quartets (Op. 131, Op. 135, the Grosse Fuge) are the hardest music to understand and the most rewarding. They weren't understood in his own time. They weren't fully understood for 50 years. The Great Fugue was published separately because publishers thought it was too strange to attach to a string quartet.

StyleBridges Classical and Romantic. Explosive dynamic contrasts, motivic development carried to extremes, dramatic silences used as structural elements. Emotionally personal in a way that hadn't existed before.

Listen: Piano Sonata No. 14 (Moonlight), Op. 27 No. 2 — everyone knows the first movement, almost nobody knows the terrifying third.