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Simply put, force of musical personality: he constantly pushed music into new areas. More than any other composer before him, Beethoven could take a simple idea and work it into a large-scale piece. The first movement of his famous Symphony No. 5, for instance, all clearly comes from the opening da-da-da-daaa figure, yet it never sounds repetitive; similarly the first movement of his Piano Sonata No. 29, the 'Hammerklavier', all springs from one short opening phrase.His symphonies were louder...

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. Brought up in a musical, though dysfunctional, family, his talent was recognized by the time he was 20 and in 1792 he was sent to study with Joseph Haydn in Vienna. The young Beethoven was a great success in Vienna, managing to make a good living from concerts, commissions and his published scores.However, by 1798 he had begun to notice that his hearing was becoming impaired. He could still compose - he could hear every note and chord he wrote in his mind'...

These sketches, among the most clearly recognizable of any in this 'sketch-book', relate to the first movement of the 'Pastoral' Symphony, his Sixth.Beethoven was a notoriously messy worker. His sketchbooks but also his working scores are full of crossings out, amendments and scribbles. The publisher of the Violin Concerto was curious to see a slip of paper pasted over a certain bar in the manuscript; he removed that, only to find another slip with a different version of that bar. He removed...

This was the first lot in the auction of music manuscripts held in November 1827, a few months after Beethoven's death, and it subsequently suffered some mutilation, like many of the other Beethoven sketchbooks. It originally comprised 96 leaves; only 59 remain in this volume, and the majority of the remainder are in a collection assembled by an early 19th-century enthusiast and now in Berlin.