"Despite their dearth of hummable tunes, Beethoven's sonatas grip and refuse to let us go," writes Stuart Isacoff in the Wall Street Journal (6/5/10).  "This is often due to his brilliant treatment of the simplest materials," Stuart continues, "his use of small musical cells as building blocks that reappear throughout a work in myriad permutations."  His very first piano sonata, Opus 2 No. 1, "opens with a rising arpeggio that is methodically shortened and fragmented as it is repeated ... with every contraction the theme gains in coiled energy, until it is whittled down to a single, explosive note ..."

Stuart says Beethoven picked up this "idea of manipulating tiny themes ... from his teacher, Franz Joseph Haydn."  He says he also picked up Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and "adapted it for the finale of his Ninth Symphony -- in which contrasting ideas  collide to give birth to a new, transcendent vision. As a result, much of his music manages to be both solidly organic and unsettled: It bristles with violence but also entrances with tenderness; it is obstinate, and also accepting." Just like Jeff Beck. (video :-)

And like a good novel, according to Aldous Huxley, who once advised writers, "Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions ... More interestingly still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another but from mood to mood.  A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different."  Or, like life itself, "a roller coaster ride of willful strife, earthy humor, crushing loneliness, explosive rage and spiritual triumph." As a critic wrote of Beethoven in 1810: "He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles."