I have called this book The New Beethoven, because, as the commemoration of the composer's birth reaches and then surpasses 250 years, we continue to find new things to say about the man, his life, and his remarkable works. For a couple of decades at the end of the twentieth century, it was assumed, naively, that everything about Beethoven had already been discovered, that commentary about his music had been exhausted, and that no further insights were possible. Over the past few years, however, with a burgeoning of further analysis and discussion, the establishment of a new international research group, and the founding of the new Center for Beethoven Research in Boston, Massachusetts, the future of Beethoven studies seems not just promising but bright with promise. Established scholars are publishing important new research, and young scholars are finding in Beethoven studies a vast landscape of intellectual and artistic opportunity.

Since 1770 few other composers in the Western musical tradition have encompassed such a wide range of human experience. And Beethoven's music was regarded as a touchstone by composers who came after him, from Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Brahms to Webern, Bartók, and Ornette Coleman. This inspiration has continued into modern times. The play 33 Variations by Moisés Kaufman, inspired by Beethoven's “Diabelli” Variations, received its premiere in 2007. In 2015 the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra commissioned five contemporary composers each to write a piano concerto inspired by one of Beethoven's five. The series ran for five years from 2015 to 2020. In 2016 the Pulitzer Prize-winning young composer Caroline Shaw premiered her Blueprint, a work for string quartet modeled on Beethoven's String Quartet, op. 18, no. 6. Also in 2020 a global partnership was created, with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and pieces of new music performed on six continents and involving ten different orchestras. (And this is not to mention the recurring presence of Beethoven, and snippets of his music, in popular culture: Schroeder's obsession in Peanuts cartoons; Walter Murphy's “A Fifth of Beethoven” [1976], memorably interpolated into the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever; the 1991 video game Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp; and a 2015 episode of the science-fiction series Doctor Who.)