Beethoven’s music is traditionally divided into three style periods. The first period (until 1800, in round numbers) covers music building on the style of Haydn and Mozart. The middle period contains characteristically “heroic” works like the Eroica and Fifth symphonies.

In the third period (from around 1818 to 1827) Beethoven’s music loses much of its earlier tone of heroism. It becomes more introspective and tends to come framed in more intimate genres than the symphony, such as the piano sonata, the string quartet, and the piano miniature (a new genre that looks to the future; see page 229). The strength of his earlier music seems to be tempered by a new gentleness and spirituality. (However, Beethoven’s mightiest symphony, the Ninth, also dates from this period.)

Beethoven’s late music also becomes more abstract — a difficult quality to specify. In part the abstractness involves his free exploration of cerebral formal designs, such as long fugues looking back on Bach, or variation forms that range farther from their themes than any before them. In part it is a matter of the themes themselves, which are reduced to fragments or to elemental musical materials: scales, quick-moving arpeggios or “broken” chords, and the like. And in part the abstractness comes from an almost miraculous control of contrast and musical flow that Beethoven now managed. This is especially evident in movements still showing the outlines of sonata form. Here themes and sections of the form are often condensed, and transitional moments are boiled down to carefully judged juxtapositions. While disruption was always a feature of Beethoven’s music — think of the fermatas in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, and the C-major trumpets in the second — now the breaks in the musical fabric can be bewildering, even unnerving.