Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 to 1827) was a German composer whose symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets carried the Classical style he inherited from Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart toward the expanded scale and emotional range that later Romantic composers would build on. Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties, a progressive deafness that was nearly total by the last decade of his life, yet he continued composing throughout, producing some of his most ambitious works, including his Ninth Symphony, after he could no longer hear his own music performed. That symphony, completed in 1824, was the first major work by a leading composer to incorporate vocal soloists and chorus into a symphony, setting Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude, Ode to Joy, in its final movement. Beethoven's career is conventionally divided by historians into early, middle, and late periods, tracing a path from Classical convention through a heroic middle period of expanded scale and drama to a late period of increasingly personal and formally exploratory work. He is widely regarded as a pivotal, transitional figure between the Classical and Romantic eras of Western music.