also "less lack of integration and structural control than ever before," as Beethoven's "innovative quest" for personal expression reached a new high point within some of his most significant achievements in classical form (11).
Paradoxically, the source of Beethoven's increasing classicism in his late period may have been the challenge that he felt from the new generation of composers. "On some level he was responding to powerful musical currents, which were soon to come flooding to the surface," as the late works of Weber and Schubert, and the first productions of Chopin, Berlioz, and Bellini all appeared during Beethoven's last decade (Kerman and Tyson 385). The great triumph of Beethoven's earlier work had been his reinterpretation of the sonata principle in his middle period. Yet, he lived long enough to see his conquest of that intellectual challenge replaced by another challenge, in which "the very basis of the sonata style was thrown into doubt" (Kerman and Tyson 385).
It is, perhaps, in his symphonies, beginning with the third, or Eroi
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