Throughout his life Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions
about his art. He approached music as he approached life weighing whatever occupied him from a
variety of perspectives: a melodic idea a musical genre a word or phrase a friend a lover
a patron money politics religion. His ability to unlock so many possibilities from each
helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole from the
heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth and from the arcane Great Fugue to the
crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory. Beethoven's works are a series of variations on his life.
The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he
assumed and projected through his music. Discarding tired myths about the composer this
introduction to the composer proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music
as an expression of his entire self.
