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Beethoven: the Greatest Composer of All Time.

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“The instrumental music of the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven forms a peak in the development of tonal music and is one of the crucial evolutionary developments in the history of music as a whole.” ~ Unknown Mozart aside, Ludwig van Beethoven is the most famous classical composer of the western world. Beethoven is remembered for his powerful and stormy compositions, and for continuing to compose and conduct even after he began to go deaf at age 28. The ominous four-note beginning to his Fifth Symphony is one of the most famous moments in all of music. He wrote nine numbered symphonies in all. Beethoven never married. After his death his friends found letters to a lover he called "Immortal Beloved," whose identity has never …show more content…

In 1812, however, he wrote a passionate love-letter to an ‘Eternally Beloved’, but the letter was never sent. With his powerful and expansive middle-period works, which include the Pastoral Symphony, Symphonies nos.7 and 8, Piano Concertos nos.4, and 5 and the Violin Concerto, as well as more chamber works and piano sonatas. Beethoven was firmly established as the greatest composer of his time. His piano-playing career had finished in 1808. That year he had considered leaving Vienna for a secure post in Germany, but three Viennese noblemen had banded together to provide him with a steady income and he remained there, although the plan foundered in the ensuing Napoleonic wars in which his patrons suffered and the value of Austrian money declined. The years after 1812 were relatively unproductive. He seems to have been seriously depressed, by his deafness and the resulting isolation, by the failure of his marital hopes and by anxieties over the custodianship of the son of his late brother, which involved him in legal actions. But he came out of these trials to write his profoundest music, which surely reflects something of what he had been through. There are seven piano sonatas in this, his ‘late period’, including the turbulent ‘Hammerklavier’ op.106, with its dynamic writing and its harsh, rebarbative fugue, and op.110, which also has fugues and much eccentric writing at the

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