According to John N. Burk, "Ludwig van Beethoven, with the exception
             of Johann Sebastian Bach, played a more decisive role in the evolution of
             music than any other single figure" (24). As a musician, Beethoven
             liberated the classical forms from their former restrictions and gave them
             an altogether new expanse and flexibility. He brought to the art of music
             new depths of expressiveness that were not known before his time and also
             brought new richness of speech to every instrument for which he wrote his
             symphonies and other musical pieces. In essence, Beethoven was highly
             influential in bringing modernity to the art of music, for as Robert H.
             Schauffler maintains, Beethoven "stands as the epitome of the master who
             initiated the turning point of the ways of modern art and combined the sum
             of past human efforts in the direction of musical design" (45). After
             Beethoven, the course of music changed drastically, due to his complete
             emancipation of human emotion and his attempts to give expression to every
             kind of mood which was worthy of being brought into the scheme of Western
             Beethoven's artistic career is generally divided into three distinct
             periods. First, ending at about 1800, was his term as an apprentice in
             which he was still comparatively under the influence of the forms and
             idioms of Haydn and Mozart, even though his strong personality was
             asserting itself in everything he did musically. His second period is
             accentuated by his deafness which seems to have affected his musical output
             very little, for between 1803 and 1804, he produced sonatas for violin and
             piano and the famous Eroica Symphony. During this second period, he also
             composed the Fourth, the Fifth and the
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             Pastoral symphonies, the opera Fidelio, the Rasumovsky Quartets, the Fourth
             and Fifth piano concertos and the Violin concerto. With these work...