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Throughout his life, Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. He approached music as he approached life, weighing whatever occupied him from a variety of perspectives: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion. His ability to unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory.

Beethoven's works are a series of variations on his life. The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he assumed and projected through his music. Discarding tired myths about the composer, this introduction to the composer proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self.