250 Years of Beethoven

Alice Benton, creative assistant, EMI PM takes a look at music's most influential artist, Beethoven. 

2020 has been a year that’s marked many things, but a date that I’m sure has been in your diary for the last few months is the 250^th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven.

This month, the Classical giant with the iconic hairdo reaches his quarter-of-a-thousandth birthday. During his life, Beethoven produced a substantial amount of music. His innovations in compositional technique engendered the dawn of the Romantic era: indeed, composers of the post-Beethovenian generation struggled to surmount his weighty, omnipresent influence. Beethoven had literally completed Classical music.  Skip forward 250 years and his era-defining music is perhaps the most widely performed and studied music in the repertoire. Quite a legacy for a man who was ostensibly deaf by his mid-thirties.

So, as arguably the most revolutionary, influential, prolific, eminent, seminal, some other superlatives, composer, who’s extensive compositional output forever changed the world of music, we reckon this is a man worth celebrating.

Introducing KPM 2199: Beethoven Recomposed. The Beethoven you love, but not as you know him.

We asked a bunch of our talented composers to reimagine Beethoven’s greatest works. We’ve scoured Beethoven’s extensive oeuvre and handpicked timeless classics, from the iconic Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, to Fur Elise and the Moonlight Sonata. Each have been masterfully picked apart and pieced back together with great compositional flair, and although these original masterpieces have found new life in new contexts, their quintessential ‘Beethovenness’ has been preserved. Old dog, new tricks.

In order to do Beethoven justice, we recorded these tracks live, with a full symphony orchestra, in Budapest over the summer. Thirteen tracks of Beethoven’s most famous works reimagined, reworked and recontextualised and encapsulating a variety of moods: from cinematic and expansive, graceful and poised, pastoral and tranquil.

We hope he’d be proud... Happy Birthday Beethoven!