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Simply put - you are not your music. It is an extremely fallacious and dangerous thought which has lead some fine leaders such as the Nazi's to deem Mendelssohn "degenerate" art, the former USSR deem many composers betrayers of the party who deserve the camps, or Peter Phillips who supported the Catholic Church in England by writing music for its liturgy at a particularly bad time and was imprisoned. The mistake made was when leaders saw these composers' musics as somehow representing an "object" against their state rather than a complex person who may or may not share the state's ideology. However, although one is not their music, one cannot separate the impact various parts of their lives have upon what they produce. It is just a slippery matter of what compartments of their lives may have had influence upon their composition. Broadly, where you live, how you are raised, what you do and whom you spend most of your time with, all influence the act of composition. As to your "willpower" , a more palatable intellectual position is what role their music composrs thought it had in society. For Mahler, each of his symphonies were his own personal sagas in sound - and an exploration of the orchestra's timbral possibilities - plus he had at his disposal a top flight orchestra to conduct. Wagner's music was in part an expression of his nationlistic pride and also a more altrustic motive to develop a classical music better connected to German mythology and history. Bach wrote a majority of his works for the church to serve a very specific function and to understand the motivation of his works requires a good solid knowledge of Lutheranism. Beethoven was incredibly influenced by the philosophy of the French Revolution --- but also was very much a working musician - he wrote for the crowd in part - albeit a wealthy crowd who supported his explorations. For these examples I skim only the very surface. If this is what you mean it is not viable to compare one composer to the other, rather the arena to look is a history of aesthetics. But again a composer is not a music filled spirit who comes down from heaven or hell or whatever netherworld to dispense his aural beautitudes. No, a composer is a human being who happens to enjoy writing music. He or she enjoys it more if they are paid for it. Once you realize that, you may see how vacuous you opening thread reads. Possibly, you need to look at the aesthetics of music in one specific area - what has been considered the predominant function of music through a particular epoch? I raise this as your division between the Baroque/Classical composers and the Romantics does point to a manifestqation of a change in aesthetics due to a transformation of what society considered the main functions of music - a transformation one can point to starting as early as the late 16th century.

Where could I find these works to listen?

You've still misunderstood me on a vital point. I have never been trying to argue that 'Beethoven is better than...' or 'Beethoven has more merit than...', simply that he has some merit or quality in his music, and I define this merit via the fact that some people regard his music as intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging enough to want to hear it of their own free will. So of course I am only confining this to a selected sample, even if this amount represents, in reality, a minority. I only want to prove that a number of people like his music, not that this is more than for another type of music or that these people are somehow superior in taste or some other factor. Of course one couldn't prove such subjective factors scientifically. Beethoven has merit simply because somebody wants to hear it, and they want to hear it because it appeals in some degree to their own, personal, subjective idea of what music should be like. This is all the more remarkable given that the audience he commands still exists today and it has come to his music freely - obviously you can't force someone to like something. I realise this also applies to practically all music - the tween girls like Justin Beiber because he appeals to their subjective ideas of what music should sound like and the act look like. Justin Beiber therefore also contains merit simply on the fact that his audience wants to engage with his output. This hinges on the notion that the purpose of music is to communicate something, which seems like a reasonable argument. We know Beethoven did intend this as his purpose because of what he wrote about his music. All I'm saying is that the merit in Beethoven lies in the fact that an audience still wants to hear his music, and that as he used a certain compositional method I believe this constitutes the success of this method. It doesn't preclude that a different method might work too, but I advocate the freedom-on-top-of-a-firm-structure approach because in Beethoven and others I can see that it produces the definition of merit explained above. My argument is NOT the crude 'Lots of people like Beethoven, therefore Beethoven is definitely good' but rather 'Some people like Beethoven, and the fact that he produced something that made them think so is how we define the merit in his work.' I'm not measuring the degree of merit according to this definition, just trying to show that it is present. The reason why I've been banging on about citing academics is that I seriously thought you were disputing the idea that amongst the classical music audience Beethoven was not in fact a popular composer, something I thought would be so empirically self-evident as to not require any proof. Ok, so I was mistaken in this interpretation of your position and probably didn't make this clear; I've been arguing against something I needn't have. Of course I'm not trying to argue that an academic or group of them or popular opinion can dictate personal taste, I never suggested this. I did argue that an academic or a member of the audience would be a reliable judge of how such an audience regards a work. I am using the fact that a significant number of people are receptive to Beethoven's work simply to conclude that his music is succeeding in engaging with an audience. The only value judgement within this would be how one would define 'popular amongst the classical music audience', because this is what I thought you were disputing. That's why I questioned whether you were arguing that Beethoven's works were not of good quality because, as you explain at length, this would be a moot point, it's unprovable.

It seems like the people on this forum disrespect (and in some cases attack) people who actively dislike the more progressive contemporary music or think it is bad. One thread I've noticed in friends that I've talked to I guess is that when prodded they think a good portion of contemporary music is actually bad, not that they just don't like it. Like it's my opinion I don't care for Debussy a lot of the time but I easily see how other people could like it.