Why is beethoven the best composer

Let us instead strike up more pleasing and joyful ones. Have you noticed how nervous hecklers often sound at public meetings? Here Beethoven is using shock tactics. Other innovations catch the ear fleetingly or take longer to sink in.

They create shapes, patterns of thinking and atmospheres that no one else could have created. They can no more be uninvented than the atom bomb. Can we say this of any other composer? And he succeeds, even when the page is black with notes that make terrifying technical demands. Although some of his later music may sound wild, verging on the atonal, it is not confused. On the contrary, Beethoven is making musical recompense for his behaviour. Why was Beethoven quite so brilliant?

View Full Size 1. The life of Bryan Magee. The US Mail keeps working in lockdown. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter Sign up. Most Popular. Happy 99th birthday, Ronald Blythe! Ronald Blythe. The day the steam age ran out of puff Paul Barnes. Current Issue. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter Email address Sign up. Before Beethoven, composers mostly wrote music to order, whether for the church or rich patrons as JS Bach did or as employees of European noble courts as Haydn and Mozart were for much of their creative lives.

If the great composers of those eras were often able to transcend such constraints to create music that was elegant and profoundly personal, Beethoven was determined to take that idea of creative independence much farther. He was born in Bonn, where his father a tenor in service of the archbishop-elector of Cologne gave Ludwig his earliest music lessons. He started formal composition and piano lessons at 10, and even published some pieces in his early teens, but little of what he wrote between and his move to Vienna in was heard in his lifetime.

In Vienna, he studied briefly with Haydn, but really began to establish himself as a pianist rather than a composer, although he was already attracting a number of wealthy sponsors, as he was able to do for much of his life. When he made his public debut as a pianist, in , it was playing what is now known as his Second Piano Concerto actually written before the first. There was revolution in the arts, too, with Romanticism already well established in literature, led in Germany by Goethe whom Beethoven hugely admired but did not meet until and in Britain by Wordsworth and the Lakeland poets.

Even his earliest piano sonatas are conceived on a far grander scale than anything his predecessors had written, and the energy that drives them often seems to signal his impatience with the constraints of classical sonata form. So, presumably, any passing aliens will get the impression that we're a planet of deaf, grumpy geniuses. See more Beethoven News. Discover Music. See more Beethoven Music. See more Beethoven Pictures.

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