““It was Haydn and Mozart who really cracked the sonata, but it was Beethoven who reinvented it, just as he reinvented the symphony. Bach was king of the Baroque; Mozart and Haydn were kings of the Classical; Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz were the great Romantics. Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner brought music into the twentieth century; Stravinsky and Schoenberg redefined harmony. But Beethoven was in a class of his own. He didn’t write music to praise God. He didn’t write it to earn a living. Beethoven wrote music because he had to.””
![“They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.” quote by Anonymous](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e1f/anonymous-1_classicists_they-the-critics-deal-with-schoenberg-s_2736267.jpg)
