Ludwig van Beethoven

# Ludwig van Beethoven He began losing his hearing in his late twenties. By his forties he was almost entirely deaf. He went on to compose the Ninth Symphony — which he never heard performed — and some of the most emotionally commanding music ever written. He straddled the Classical and Romantic eras and defined both. He was difficult, combative, and prone to fury. He was also the composer who turned personal suffering into universal transcendence so completely that audiences two centuries later still weep at the notes he wrote in silence.