The music of Ludwig van Beethoven is considered to have been a driving force behind a fundamental change in listening expectations between the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In this period, we have been told again and again, the listeners’ attention was increasingly directed toward teleological progress and the seamless unifying development of musical processes in accordance with “unalterable rational laws.” Until well into the twentieth century Beethoven's music was a major field of activity for music historians and educators. Accordingly, the ideas ascribed to it were also transferred from the world of aesthetics to everyday existence: no other music, it was argued, was better suited to give cultural credence to the guiding economic principles of the modern era, such as labor and rationalization, development and growth. Whether this view can be accounted for primarily by the quality of Beethoven's music, the ease with which it can be taught, or simply by the ideology of “aggressive nationalism” eludes an easy answer. But there can be no doubt that it resulted in the establishment of a long-lasting “Beethoven paradigm” for the whole of Western musical thought, a paradigm with a powerful impact on compositional technique and aesthetics.

Traces of this epochal breech around 1800, between a seemingly natural “sense of tradition” and a newly fertile “awareness of the past,” were already evident during Beethoven's lifetime. The associated loss of a “self-evident bidirectional gaze” at past and present already appeared in the way contemporaries dealt with the unique phenomenon of Beethoven. At an early date disconcerted critics spoke of the “dark artificiality or […] artificial darkness” of Beethoven's piano sonatas, uncomfortably accentuating their artistry and deliberateness. A few decades later, on the other hand, criticism had turned positive and established the “paradigm”: all composition textbooks that touched on Beethoven now praised the deliberate balance he struck between uniqueness and convention, originality and accessibility.

One of the foundational documents of the “Beethoven paradigm” is the well-known adage that Count Ferdinand von Waldstein entered in the young composer's album: “With the help of unceasing diligence you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” Its binding character led not only to a far-reaching battle for Beethoven's legacy between the New German School and the circles associated with Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, but also to profound changes in the field of music theory.