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Tom Service is well known as a music journalist, and presents 'Music Matters' on  Radio 3.  
Here he shares his impressions of Beethoven's music.

Who is Beethoven? Our image of him is as the great revolutionary, the man who shattered the frames of classical forms in an endless quest for self-expression, the guy who put emotion centre-stage in his music, and who railed against the politics and patrons of his day. This is the message conveyed by the haggard face that peers out from countless record covers, and by the crumpled, tousled countenance, immortalised in plaster busts, that adorns pianos the world over. Beethoven has become a touchstone for everything that's worth anything in classical music.

At least, so goes the Beethoven myth, an amazingly powerful cultural construct that's taken hundreds of years of books, recordings, and documentaries to create. It's really hard to reach beneath the Beethoven legend, but I think we ought to try. A lot of the time, the mythical Beethoven obscures the dynamism and richness of the music. Instead of creating works of seamless perfection, as some of the history books tell us, the more I think about his music, the more I'm fascinated instead by its contradictions, its weird and worldly paradoxes. Take the Missa Solemnis. A self-consciously great work, certainly - and still one of the most unpredictable and shocking things you'll ever hear. But how do you explain the military tattoo that interrupts the Agnus Dei? Right in the middle of this hymn to eternal peace is an image of a marching army! It's a brilliant moment because it lurches the music right down to the filth and horror of humanity from the heights of apparently spiritual contemplation.

And that's the thing with Beethoven: there's an unresolved tension between the complexities and mundanities of the world and a striving for something beyond our experience. But both poles are connected: just think of the way the finale of the Ninth Symphony veers from the infectious rhythms of a Turkish march to the sublimity of its choral writing. I'm really looking forward to hearing the unknown Beethoven this week; comparative rarities like the cantata, Der Glorreiche Augenblick ('The Glorious Moment'), or the tub-thumping militarism of Wellington's Victory. These were pieces that Beethoven wrote not because he was trying to further the cause of music, but because he wanted the money, and wanted to make himself the most well-known composer in Europe. He was even willing in 1814, when he wrote The Glorious Moment, to set a text extolling the virtues of monarchy as the most natural political system - this from the composer who we think of as one of the great republican libertarians. You might think these pieces are miles away from the pinnacles like the Ninth Symphony - but in fact, they're closely connected, both in their rhetoric and their material. It's the chance to hear individual works in the context of everything he wrote that's going to be really illuminating during this week of Beethoven. I think he'll emerge as more important to us because of his relationship with the world around him, as much as because he transcended it. Who is Beethoven? I'm looking forward to finding out!