Beethoven's Belles.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) stands among the most consequential figures in the history of Western music, a composer whose work bridged the Classical and Romantic eras and fundamentally reshaped the expressive possibilities of nearly every genre he undertook. Born in Bonn and trained in the traditions of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven settled in Vienna in 1792, where he established himself first as a virtuoso pianist and subsequently as a composer of unprecedented ambition and individuality. His nine symphonies, sixteen string quartets, thirty-two piano sonatas, and the opera Fidelio transformed the formal and emotional scope of instrumental and vocal music alike, while his late works—the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, and the final quartets among them—pressed beyond the conventions of his time and anticipated the harmonic and structural innovations of the century to follow. The progressive deafness that afflicted him from his late twenties, and which had rendered him almost wholly deaf by the final decade of his life, lent his biography a tragic dimension that has shaped his reception ever since, casting him in the popular imagination as the archetypal Romantic artist whose creative vision triumphed over personal suffering.