I compose, conduct and play the piano. I trained in the Classical style and my music drove the move into Romantic music, expanding the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet.
In the finale of my String Quartet in F major, Op. 135 (1826), I wrote a question under the slow chords and its answer over the fast main theme — the music itself carries the argument.
My Ninth Symphony adds choral forces to the orchestra in its last movement. It premiered in Vienna on 7 May 1824 to great acclaim, with the chorus singing the score I refused to simplify.
In 1819 Antonio Diabelli invited 50 Viennese composers to write one variation each on his theme. I set out to outdo the field and finished 33 variations, Op. 120, completed in 1823.
From the 1810s I studied older music — Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Bach and Handel — and built its polyphony, church modes and Baroque devices into a new late style of composition.
When the violinist Felix Radicati said my Razumovsky quartets were "not music", I told him they were for a later age. My most demanding works were judged by the future of music, not by their premieres.
Fidelio, my only opera and my largest work to that point, failed critically and financially in November 1805. I revised it, and the third version was well received in July 1814 and staged often after.
After Heiligenstadt I set out on 'a new way'. The Third Symphony, Op. 55 (1803–04), was longer and larger in scope than any previous symphony and opened my heroic middle period of music.
My resolve, written to Franz Wegeler as my hearing failed: to keep working rather than yield. The same year I wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, resolving to live for and through my art.
My hearing began to fail in 1798. It ended my career as a performing pianist by 1814, yet my most ambitious music — the middle period and the Ninth Symphony — was composed after it began.
I learned to control how my music reached the public: hold works back for impact, hire the hall myself, frame new pieces among proven ones, and give patrons an exclusive period before publication.
I came to Vienna in 1792 to study, not yet to publish. I worked on counterpoint under Haydn, then Albrechtsberger, and studied Italian vocal style with Salieri — training that made my Op. 1 a success.
I worked with the instruments of Stein, Streicher, Érard, Broadwood and Graf. My demand for a more resonant, flexible piano left its imprint on the design of the modern instrument.
