Ludwig. What a name!

"You will ask me whence I take my ideas? That I cannot say with any degree of certainty: they come to me univited, directly or indirectly. I could almost grasp them in my hands, out in Nature's open, in the woods, during my promenades, in the silence of the night, at the earliest dawn. They are roused by moods which in the poet's case are transmuted into words, and in mine into tones, that sound, roar and storm until at last they take shape for me as notes."

-Ludwig van Beethoven


"...there was in those small piercing eyes an expression which no painter could render. It was a feeling of sublimity and melancholy combined."

- Sir Julius Benedict