Ludwig van Beethoven: 10 quotes for his birthday

Ludwig van Beethoven was likely born on December 17, 1770. Beethoven's father, Johann, quickly realized that his son was a musical prodigy. Beethoven learned music from an early age, giving his first public performance at the age of seven. Known for his iconoclastic musical style and his short temper, Beethoven was soon considered a great pianist and the most important composer of his generation. He began to lose his hearing at the age of 26, and contemplated suicide for a while while attempting to come to terms with the idea of being a deaf musician. Fortunately, he pushed through, composing some of his greatest works without being able to hear a single note. After the finale of his Symphony No. 9, he had to be turned around to see the massive standing ovation from the shouting audience. His works pushed the boundaries of what music was capable of, calling for more powerful orchestras and more skilled musicians. Beethoven also threw off the shackles of the upper-class nobility that had controlled Western classical music for centuries, challenging the status quo and forever helping to establish music as a force for political and social change. Here, for his birthday, are 10 profound, temperamental, and epic quotes from one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time.

AP Photo
Classical composer Ludwig Van Beethoven is seen in this undated sketch.

1. Music

AP Photo/Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
In this undated photo provided by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Frank Almond plays a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin.

"I despise a world which does not feel that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."

– from a letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (May 28, 1810)

1 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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