The compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven in the key of C minor carry special significance for many listeners.

[citation needed] Mozart, for instance, wrote only very few works in this key, but they are among his most dramatic ones (the twenty-fourth piano concerto, the fourteenth piano sonata, the Masonic Funeral Music, the Adagio and Fugue in C minor and the Great Mass in C minor, for instance).

Beethoven chose to write a much larger proportion of his works in this key, especially traditionally "salon" (i.e. light and diverting) genres such as sonatas and trios, as a sort of conscious rejection of older aesthetics, valuing the "sublime" and "difficult" above music that is "merely" pleasing to the ear.

"[3] The key is said to represent for Beethoven a "stormy, heroic tonality";[4] he uses it for "works of unusual intensity";[5] and it is "reserved for his most dramatic music".

[6] Pianist and scholar Charles Rosen writes:[7] Beethoven in C minor has come to symbolize his artistic character.