Beethoven's Musical Style

Beethoven's Musical Style

Ludwig van Beethoven is generally viewed as one of the most influential figures in the history of European classical music. Since his lifetime, when he was "universally accepted as the greatest living composer," Beethoven's music has remained among the most performed, discussed and reviewed. Scholarly journals are devoted to analysis of his life and work, he has been the subject of numerous biographies and monographs and his music was the driving force behind the development of Schenkerian analysis. He is widely considered as among the most important Western composers, and along with Bach and Mozart, his music is the most frequently recorded.

Beethoven's stylistic innovations encompass two achievements. First, they brought the Classical form to its highest expressive level, expanding in formal, structural and harmonic terms the musical idiom developed by predecessors such as Mozart and Haydn. Additionally, they proved immensely influential over the musical language and thinking of the Romantic era, whether as a source of direct inspiration, as with the music of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, or in terms of defining a musical reaction against his stylistic language, as with music of Mendelssohn.