This is why Beethoven's music is so fascinating

Beethoven's scores look like battlefields. From the first sketch to the finished score, many steps are needed.

Beethoven struggled with himself and his perfectionism. The handwriting of his 6th symphony, the "Pastorale", shows how much effort the last and best version cost him.

Beethoven's writing was often so illegible that even his copyists had difficulties in transferring the notes into fair copy.

In the final step, Beethoven uses red mineral paint to draw in necessary changes. While Mozart wrote one composition after the other, Beethoven struggles to find the last valid version.

In the second movement of the symphony, Beethoven inserts birdcalls. He instructs his copyist: "write the word nightingale, quail, /cuckoo in the first / flute, in the first oboe, in the first / and second clarinet, just like this in / the score"

In the symphony's fourth movement, Beethoven creates a threatening thunderstorm mood with the low strings and timpani, which then unleashes itself in a great thunder with all instruments.

Beethoven always went one step further than his predecessors. For almost four years he worked on his "Missa Solemnis". It was actually supposed to be the coronation mass for Archduke Rudolph of Austria, but Beethoven delayed the composition more and more. And when it was finally finished, it broke all musical specifications of a pure "mass". Instead, it was performed as a sacred concert.

Beethoven wanted to express himself more strongly than any of his predecessors. That is why he needed more instruments than his predecessors.

Because Beethoven needed more instruments than the score could show on one page, the trombone parts are marked in red here. 

Beethoven thought his compositions like an exciting play - with unpredictable twists and turns and a cracking climax!

Beethoven was the first composer to use a choir and vocal soloists in a symphony. For the text he used Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy": Beethoven's ideals, summarized in one poem: freedom, equality, brotherhood.