This course offers a biographical and musical study of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) that places emphasis on his life in a social, political, and cultural context.
Beethoven exhibited a pathological hatred for authority, a persecution complex, and delusional behaviors. Together with his deafness, this forced him to look inward and reinvent the nature of musical expression in the Western world.
These lectures also include excerpts from more than a dozen of his works, to make the case that Beethoven was one of the great disruptive forces in the history of music, after whom nothing could ever be the same again.