A brilliant pianist and great improviser, Liszt fervently admired the composer whose work he divided into two distinct periods, “one where traditional form still dominates his thought and the other where his thought determines, recreates and shapes the form”. As early as 1798, Ludwig van Beethoven understood that his faculties were diminishing as the first signs of deafness appeared, which led him to attempt suicide in 1802. However, the energy and ardent desire to love won him over and the composer used his time for composition leaving masterpieces for humanity, which emerged from the light of silence. Beethoven’s work aims for communion and hope and hails the beauties of the world.
Ludwig van Beethoven's legacy
A solitary giant and misanthropist, Ludwig van Beethoven's work prolonged the balance of classicism and opens up the abysses of Romanticism. He was able to forge a new musical language, between tradition and modernity. René Leibowitz evoked, “a composer of the greatest inspiration, and what’s more, a musician racked by a visible obsession with an ideal of form and structure constantly pushed to the very limits of what the human mind is capable of apprehending, grasping and forming”. His influence would determine Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms who venerated him.
