I've been thinking about Beethoven a lot lately, and of a particular description that I heard of him some years back by one of my college professors, who called him "almost a Promethean figure", which seems entirely right to me. Basically, the more one learns about his life and work, the more awestruck one becomes, and perhaps most importantly, the more deeply one can enter into the music - which is on a level with the greatest human accomplishments in any field. His works always contain structural clarity, and yet they are daring and ground-breaking as they push against the boundaries of form. They contain therefore "the unexpected and the obvious", the elements of great art from Ezra Pound's dictum. Here's the picturesque first movement from the Sixth Symphony - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJPZ-mu-Ts - as case in point.