‘You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!’
Johannes Brahms German composer
‘I detest Beethoven!’
Igor Stravinsky Russian composer, 1922
‘At 80, I have found new joy in Beethoven’
Igor Stravinsky again, 1962
‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man’
EM Forster English author
‘[In Beethoven’s music] the dreamer will recognise his dreams, the sailor his storms, and the wolf his forests’
Victor Hugo French author
‘Everything will pass and the world will perish but the Ninth will remain’
Mikhail Bakunin Russian revolutionary
‘At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome’
Friedrich Nietzsche German philosopher
‘Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer’
John Ruskin English art critic
‘It would be possible to describe absolutely everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure’
Albert Einstein German physicist
‘If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Beethoven composed music’
Martin Luther King Jr US minister and activist
Read reviews of the latest Beethoven recordings here
