'I detest him'... 'The most sublime music ever'... 11 of the best quotes about Beethoven

Read on to discover 11 quotes about Beethoven - from those who admired and loved him, to those who despised him...

Most big personalities divide opinion, and Beethoven was no exception. He was, after all, a figure known as much for his passionate, sometimes difficult, temper as for his equally passionate – and often difficult – music. Add to this his huge impact on the story of classical music, helping to usher in the Romantic era, and it's unsurprising that his peers and critics developed strong opinions about him.

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Below you will find 11 quotes about Beethoven by those who loved - and hated - the man and his music...

Quotes about Beethoven... Johannes Brahms, composer

‘You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!’

Igor Stravinsky, Russian composer in 1922

‘I detest Beethoven!’

Igor Stravinsky... again in 1962

‘At 80, I have found new joy in Beethoven’

Quotes about Beethoven... EM Forster, English author

‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man’

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Victor Hugo, French author

‘[In Beethoven’s music] the dreamer will recognise his dreams, the sailor his storms, and the wolf his forests’

Mikhail Bakunin, Russian revolutionary

‘Everything will pass and the world will perish but Beethoven's Ninth [Symphony] will remain’

Quotes about Beethoven... Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher

‘At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome’

John Ruskin, English art critic

‘Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer’

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Albert Einstein, German physicist

‘It would be possible to describe absolutely everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure’

Quotes about Beethoven... Martin Luther King, Jr, US minister and activist

‘If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Beethoven composed music’

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer

Apocryphally, having heard Beethoven play and improvise at the piano...

'Mark my words, the world will hear from that young man'

• A document of despair: how Beethoven's anguished Heiligenstadt Testament revealed his advancing deafness