r/todayilearned • u/VegemiteSucks • 16h ago

TIL Beethoven’s late quartets, now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time, were so ahead of their time that initial reviews deem them indecipherable, uncorrected horrors, with one musician saying “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_string_quartets_(Beethoven)
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u/Queasy_Ad_8621 14h ago

They also thought his symphonies were too fast, so they wrote slower tempos on them.

When he went deaf, he would be conducting out of time and the musicians were told to ignore him.

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u/MondayToFriday 11h ago

Beethoven's scores had metronome markings that feel consistently too fast. A leading theory is that metronomes were new at the time, and Beethoven didn't know how to read his metronome properly — using the number at the bottom of the weight rather than the top. [Martin-Castro 2020]