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Writer, journalist and playwright Paul Allen is a presenter of Radio 3's Night Waves.

'Like most people who have played the trombone, I have always suspected that players of other instruments were laughing behind my back even if I played well (more often laughing in my face of course) and so I am grateful to Beethoven for making the instrument an essential part of a symphony orchestra.

It's Beethoven the great romantic that I cherish; he was wrong about Napoleon but only because he had such high hopes.'

Paul's recommendations:


'Right now, as the Lindsay String Quartet are working their way through their final season with all Beethoven's quartets in my home town of Sheffield, I have a sense of the almost agonising pleasure the late quartets bring to the end of things.' 


'It is fitting that this is the European anthem because Beethoven and Schiller were working before Germany was a nation state and it enshrines the innocent but essential belief that humanity is more than individuals or nations.' 


'My most cherished passage in all his work is the moment in his only opera, Fidelio, when the political prisoners emerge from jail, blinking into the sunlight. God knows, Beethoven had a wretched life in many ways, but he still stands for hope against cynicism.'