Beethoven Rules. Period. (or "Full Stop" as they'd say in Australia)

I would just like to say that Beethoven is a fucking genius.

In his first Symphony, he immediately makes a statement by beginning the piece with a dominant 7 chord. But it's the dominant of the forth scale degree!! By the end of the first section of the introduction, after he's tugged us around for a bit, we arrive at a very likely looking cadence that Beethoven soon shows us is actually the dominant! Though we are now finally sitting comfortably in the key of C Major, we don't come to a full Perfect Authentic Cadence until end of the introduction and beginning of the Allegro con brio.


Let’s look at his 9th and last Symphony... He starts off his masterpiece with open fifths for 14 bars. It is so well orchestrated that it sounds like more than just two noncommittal notes. Not only that but because they are open fifths and lack a 3rd, you really have no way of knowing the quality of the chord. When Beethoven "flips" the sonority by lowering the upper note to create a 4th and finally establishes the third and we find that it is minor, we find out that, little did we know, but the incomplete chord that we have been hearing was not the tonic chord, oh no, but the DOMINANT! WTF! Beethoven is laughing at us! He says,”you ignorant fools!” and laughs and laughs. But his teasing is not over. Not at all. Not only does he do what had never been done before by putting a chorus and soloists in with the orchestra and still have the audacity to label the work “symphony”, but, in the last movement, along with his triumphant and very famous “Ode to Joy”, he includes a Turkish folk song orchestrated in such a way that the public would immediately recognize it as such! In a society where the Turks were as controversial as they were, this is simply unheard-of and shocking! But Beethoven didn’t care. Not one bit.