On Dec. 16, while the classical music world is honoring Beethoven’s 250th birthday, the international community of scholars devoted to his music will also be honoring another round-numbered occasion: ...

It is the artistic human-interest story to end them all. The most famous "Classical" composer spent the better part of his late composing period almost completely deaf, in the process completing a ...

Imagine you're a teenager in Beijing in the 1960s and '70s, during the Cultural Revolution. Everything that's deemed Western and bourgeois is banned — so listening to a 78 rpm recording of Beethoven's ...

Freedom in Beethoven’s music takes many, frequently overlapping forms. There is heroic freedom in the Eroica (1803), freedom from political oppression in the Egmont Overture (1810), artistic freedom ...

Chinese students played it in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Leonard Bernstein led a performance of it in Berlin when the wall came down that same year. Chilean women sang it outside the prisons where ...

12/09/20 UPDATE: While we're no longer collecting Beethoven stories for air, we're always happy to hear from you. NPR’s Susan Stamberg has been a public radio “celebrity” for close to 50 years. She co ...