Ludwig van Beethoven

What does a man do when he loses the very sense required to hear his own masterpiece? He didn't just write music; he seized fate by the throat and forced it to sing. "I will grapple with fate; it shall not quite knock me down," he roared through his symphonies as the silence of his deafness closed in. He is the master of the heroic struggle, the one who turned the polite drawing-room music of the aristocracy into a revolutionary storm. To hear his Ninth is to realize that humanity is capable of joy even in the midst of a crushing darkness. He is the thunder of the spirit.