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“I suppose it is a kind of gargantuan egoism on Beethoven’s part to pretend that he was capable of going beyond humanity into the realm of the timeless and the principled. But his egoism, his carefully constructed subjectivity, his aesthetic norms are all part of the attempt to rise out of the particular, the historical, the political. Early Romantic art is full of this disenchantment with the worldly, even in supposedly political works; it is fascinating not because it is humanistic as it pretends but precisely because its aims are to dehumanize and depoliticize.”

- Edward Said, in Music and Feminism