Great Masters: Beethoven - His Life and Music (Audiobook - TTC) (Repost)

This course by Professor Robert Greenberg is a biographical and musical study of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). It puts the great musician's life in a social, political, and cultural context. First and foremost, it is a biographical study, and includes excerpts from more than a dozen of Beethoven's works. Dr. Greenberg will make the case that Beethoven was one of the most prolific and inspiring forces in the history of music, after whom nothing could ever be the same again. You learn about the core features of some of his greatest music, but without the detailed, technical analyses in the courses The Symphonies of Beethoven, or in the Concert Masterworks series, wherein Professor Greenberg discusses Beethoven's Emperor Concerto and Violin Concerto. Beethoven's appearance was somewhat off-putting. He was short with a thick body and an unusually large head, covered with his famous wild hair. Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab, a journalist, music critic, and contemporary of Beethoven's, described his hair as "Not frizzy, not straight, but a mixture of everything." Beethoven was physically clumsy; he was liable to knock over or break anything he touched. He could not keep time when dancing and had problems cutting and shaping the quill pens he needed for writing. Beethoven exhibited a pathological hatred for authority, a persecution complex, and delusional behaviors. With his deafness, these problems forced him to look inward and reinvent himself. In doing so, he reinvented the nature of musical expression in the Western world.