Who did beethoven influence
Composers inspired by beethoven.
Beethoven's influence on other composers
Mahler, Brahms, Schoenberg, changing the symphony forever and redefining string quartets.
What inspired beethoven to write music
Classic FM explores the composer's influence on succeeding generations.
Had Ludwig van Beethoven never existed, could he have been invented? Any Hollywood film director with an eye for a good story could have sketched out the finer details: young genius composer who studies with Haydn, realises he is a genius as Eureka moments hit him with exhilarating regularity.
But then – in a twist of fate worthy of a Jeffrey Archer blockbuster – our hero, enjoying his hard-earned success, goes deaf.
In the end, he descends into a frustrated, depressive struggle – as tortured geniuses tend to – his deafness alienating him from the world and from the pleasure of sound, as, at the same time, his music achieves unheralded plateaus of intricacy and perfection.
In that his life occupied a near-Shakespearean arc of triumph