"Those who come after him will not continue where he left off; they will have to begin anew, as he left off where art itself comes to an end." (Franz Grillparzer, Funeral Oration for Ludwig van Beethoven, 1827) The 175th anniversary of Beethoven's death provided a fitting occasion to ask four prominent composers to put their thoughts on the composer into music. Beethoven was an artist of seemingly superhuman powers, at once a revolutionary and a consummation of the past. Can he still be a source of inspiration today for "those who come after him"? The answers to this question are as different as the composers themselves. Manfred Trojahn has provided "tinted" orchestral arrangements of Beethoven's lieder and projected them into a song cycle of his own, scored for the same forces. Jürg Baur has lent a symphonic framework to a cycle of songs on poems by Paul Celan. Pascal Dusapin, in his Piano Concerto, has elevated Beethoven’s dialectics into a clash of abysses. Mauricio Sotelo, in his String Quartet, has produced a double-exposure that draws on the opposing worlds of Beethoven's op. 132 and Nono's Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima. These commissions from the International Beethoven Festival Bonn (Internationale Beethovenfeste Bonn) were made possible by a generous donation from the North Rhine-Westphalian Foundation for Art and Culture.