Also unknown to the crowds, it would be Beethoven’s posthumous fate to be dug up twice before being moved to Vienna’s enormous Zentralfriedhof where today he lies beneath a copy of his original obelisk surrounded by other famous composers or else (as in Mozart’s case) their memorials: the nearest thing to a musicians’ Valhalla as can be found. In Thomas Hardy’s epic verse drama about the Napoleonic era The Dynasts, Napoleon muses after Waterloo:

‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves

To light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour.’¹

Beethoven might equally well have said the same on his deathbed. Such is the passing of heroes.

The extraordinary art this hacked and rotting body had so lately produced and which has so deeply influenced people’s minds for nearly two centuries still offers plentiful evidence of things not seen. Much of it has an unmistakably visionary quality, but a vision of what none can say. The cultural tyranny that Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies in particular have imposed for the best part of two centuries is unfortunate if it has deterred a wider listening public from revelling in the exquisite balance and lyrical qualities of so many of his earlier works (for example, the Op. 18 string quartets or the ‘Pastoral’ Piano Sonata, Op. 28), as well as the sublime inscrutabilities of the last five string quartets, the last three piano sonatas, the Diabelli Variations for piano and, of course, the Grosse Fuge. Intended as the last movement of the Op. 130 string quartet, this work was deemed too knotty and unplayable at the time, and Beethoven instead substituted a more conventional finale. The Grosse Fuge went on to baffle the entire nineteenth century. It was seen as one of the Master’s aberrations it was best to draw a veil over (like the Battle Symphony), and it was really only in the twentieth century that people began to come to terms with it. It was Stravinsky who famously described it as ‘this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary for ever’.