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Born
December 16 (some sources say December 17), 1770 in Bonn,
Germany. 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.
The early compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven marked the
culmination of the 18th-century traditions for which Haydn
and Mozart had established the great classical models, and
his middle-period and late works developed so far beyond
these traditions that they anticipated some of the major
musical trends of the late 19th century. This is especially
evident in his symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas.
In each of these three genres Beethoven began by mastering
the existing formal and esthetic conventions of the late
18th century while joining to these conventions signs of
unusual originality and power. In his middle period (from
about 1803, the year of the Eroica Symphony, to about 1814,
the year of his opera Fidelio in its revised form) he proceeded
to develop methods of elaboration of musical ideas that
required such enlargement and alteration in perception of
formal design as to render it clear that the conventions
associated with the genres inherited from the 18th century
were for him the merest scaffolding for works of the highest
individuality and cogency.
If Beethoven's contemporaries were able to follow him with
admiration in his middle-period works, they were left far
behind by the major compositions of his last years, especially
the last three Piano Sonatas, Op. 109, 110, and 111; the
Missa solemnis; the Ninth Symphony; and the last six String
Quartets, Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, and 135. These works
required more than a generation after Beethoven's death
to be received at all by concert audiences and were at first
the preserve of a few perceptive musicians. Composers as
different in viewpoint from one another as Brahms and Wagner
took Beethoven equally as their major predecessor; Wagner
indeed regarded his own music dramas as the legitimate continuation
of the Beethoven tradition, which in his view had exhausted
the possibilities of purely instrumental music. Beethoven's
last works continue in the 20th century to pose the deepest
challenges to musical perception.
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