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Beethoven ruined Western art music.
It's shocking how all the things that slowly wrung the life out of it were pioneered by him, or at the very least synthesized and forcefully, desperately hurled at the Western ear until it succumbed to a kind of Stockholm syndrome. This constantly expanding compendium of aural garbage slowly became a meme (in the real sense of the word), it gradually started stifling music as the West knew it and eventually replaced it altogether.
Composers like Chopin or Alkan, and later Debussy or Scriabin were powerless to turn the tides against the onslaught of Beethovenian shit that was operating autonomously as early as the 1830s, a real self-replicating idea, a real meme.
Beethoven (thankfully) died in 1827, Western art music was dead in less than 100 years. Mashing monkey, jittering cretin, pestilential hillbilly. Fuck Beethoven.