Some 150 years lie between Johannes Brahms's quip to conductor Hermann Levi – “You can't have any idea what it's like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!”– and John Adams's confession: “Having Beethoven in the car while you are driving is exhilarating and terrifying and very humbling.” And yet, Franz Schubert's famous question notwithstanding (“[W]ho can do anything after Beethoven?”), generations of composers have done one thing above all else: they have composed music, even and especially if it meant engaging with Beethoven. The reasons why his music has been so uniquely important to subsequent generations is neatly summarized by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: “In each of his major works, Beethoven invents new categories of music altogether. We find novel and previously unknown procedures and approaches whose ground-breaking qualities came to fruition only in the heyday of modern music […]. There is hardly anything that Beethoven hasn't already considered, hardly any problems whose solution his music hasn't already prefigured.”

If Beethoven can function as a point of reference on such a scale for almost any form of composition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the range of strategies for referring to his music is virtually limitless. Almost every compositional technique could be shown in one way or another to derive from Beethoven, and the only way to refer to him explicitly would be through titles, explanatory notes, documented quotations, or the like. Beethoven is omnipresent, all-powerful, almost inescapable. To quote Steffen Schleiermacher, any attempt to approach a “great composer from the past is always a difficult business. Today, if you want to rise above blatant quotation and avoid the absurd temptation to compose ‘… in the style of …’, you quickly reach your limits as a composer. […] On the other hand, perhaps the most honest way of approaching the great composer– simply writing the best piece you can and dedicating it to him– is unavailable owing to the danger of arbitrariness. So how to proceed?”