From fiery put-downs to poetic tributes, Beethoven has inspired some of the sharpest, strangest, and most stirring words in music history.
Composers, critics, and even the man himself have had plenty to say—so crank up the drama and dive into the boldest, brashest, and most brilliant quotes about the great man.
‘You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!’
- Johannes Brahms, composer
‘I detest Beethoven!’
- Igor Stravinsky, composer, 1922
‘At 80, I have found new joy in Beethoven’
- Igor Stravinsky, again, in 1962
‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man’
- EM Forster, author
‘[In Beethoven’s music] the dreamer will recognise his dreams, the sailor his storms, and the wolf his forests’
- Victor Hugo, French author
‘Everything will pass and the world will perish but Beethoven's Ninth [Symphony] will remain’
- Mikhail Bakhunin, Russian revolutionary anarchist
‘At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome’
- Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
‘Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer’
- John Ruskin, English art critic
‘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’
- Albert Einstein, German physicist
‘If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Beethoven composed music’
- Martin Luther King, Jr, US minister and activist
'Mark my words, the world will hear from that young man'
- Mozart, composer
(Apocryphally, having heard Beethoven play and improvise at the piano)
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