LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN HIS LIFE AND MUSIC essays

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN HIS LIFE AND MUSIC essays According to John N. Burk, "Ludwig van Beethoven, with the exception of Johann Sebastian Bach, played a more decisive role in the evolution of music than any other single figure" (24). As a musician, Beethoven liberated the classical forms from their former restrictions and gave them an altogether new expanse and flexibility. He brought to the art of music new depths of expressiveness that were not known before his time and also brought new richness of speech to every instrument for which he wrote his symphonies and other musical pieces. In essence, Beethoven was highly influential in bringing modernity to the art of music, for as Robert H. Schauffler maintains, Beethoven "stands as the epitome of the master who initiated the turning point of the ways of modern art and combined the sum of past human efforts in the direction of musical design" (45). After Beethoven, the course of music changed drastically, due to his complete emancipation of human emotion and his attempts to give expression to every kind of mood which was worthy of being brought into the scheme of Western Beethoven's artistic career is generally divided into three distinct periods. First, ending at about 1800, was his term as an apprentice in which he was still comparatively under the influence of the forms and idioms of Haydn and Mozart, even though his strong personality was asserting itself in everything he did musically. His second period is accentuated by his deafness which seems to have affected his musical output very little, for between 1803 and 1804, he produced sonatas for violin and piano and the famous Eroica Symphony. During this second period, he also composed the Fourth, the Fifth and the 2 Pastoral symphonies, the opera Fidelio, the Rasumovsky Quartets, the Fourth and Fifth piano concertos and the Violin concerto. With these work...