The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven

Beethoven is the first composer of the European classical canon whose main corpus of work has been continuously performed since his own time. Bach’s music was seldom heard until some way into the nineteenth century; only a few of Handel’s works were performed until recently; most of Haydn’s compositions fell into a long eclipse; and only a relatively small number of Mozart’s survived in performance until the mid‐twentieth century. Beethoven, however, standing astride the transition from the classical to the romantic periods in the conventional view of music history, and indeed largely responsible, certainly hugely influential, for the later romantics,...