Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven was born in Bonn and from his early twenties worked in Vienna, where patrons such as Prince Lichnowsky and Archduke Rudolf supported him. He dedicated fourteen works to Rudolf, among them the Archduke Trio. He learned the manner of Haydn and Mozart and then stretched it. His career is usually split into three periods, a scheme that fits the string quartets most neatly.

The early works (to about 1802) include the first two symphonies, the Op. 18 quartets, the first two piano concertos and the first twenty piano sonatas. They follow Viennese models but use extreme dynamics and tempi and chromatic harmony, and the sonatas often have four movements with a scherzo in place of the minuet. The middle period, from the Eroica, is on a larger scale and often called heroic: Symphonies 3 to 8, the last two piano concertos, the Violin and Triple Concertos, quartets 7 to 11, and the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas.

In the late period he studied chant, Palestrina, Bach and Handel, and the music takes on polyphony, church modes and Baroque devices: a Handel-like fugue in The Consecration of the House overture (1822), late piano sonatas that use fugue and depart from the usual sonata plan, a quartet (Op. 131) with seven linked movements, and the Ninth Symphony, which adds voices to the finale. The Grosse Fuge was first the finale of a quartet. Audiences found it very difficult in 1826, and the publisher Artaria persuaded Beethoven to write a new finale and print the fugue separately as Op. 133.