This seminar will explore two aspects of Ludwig van Beethoven’s enormous significance for the musical culture of the past two centuries. First, it examines key characteristics of his musical style and personality which have come to define not only the composer himself but the very concept of Western “art” music: individuality, idiosyncrasy and originality, “genius,” heroism, the close connection between life experience and artistic creativity, and deep coherence and architectural grandeur of musical works. Then it considers how the image of the “great” composer exemplified by Beethoven came to form a compelling and problematic legacy in worldwide contexts far removed from his own early nineteenth-century Viennese milieu. Among the topics to be covered in this second part of the course are notions of Beethoven as Romantic hero (nineteenth-century Germany), as Christ-like suffering figure and socialist paradigm (nineteenth-century France), and paradoxically as representative both of political liberation (twentieth-century Europe and Asia) and masculinist hegemony (in contemporary gender theory).