"Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the Ninth Symphony seems the most like a construction …"

"The last five quartets did not mean so much to the Romantics, and it remained for the twentieth century to make them …"

"I forswore my model, Beethoven; his last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a whole great epoch of art, beyond whose l…"

"This symphony is also in F, like the Pastoral, though it is designed on a more modest scale than the preceding sympho…"

"The first rehearsal of the symphony was terrible, but the hornist did, in fact, come in on cue. I was standing next t…"

"In writing this symphony, Beethoven had been thinking of Buonaparte, but Buonaparte while he was First Consul. At tha…"

"There is an “oracle” at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony–in those four notes lies one of Beethoven’s greatest mess…"

"So in Beethoven’s mind there was presumably some dramatic scenario behind the Fifth Symphony, but he decided that, li…"

"So, there's this man, he has a time machine. Up and down history he goes — zip, zip, zip, zip, zip — getting into scr…"

"It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into…"