The compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven in the key of C minor carry special significance for many listeners. His works in this key have been said to be powerful and emotive, evoking dark and stormy sentiments.

During the Classical era, C minor was used infrequently and often for works of a particularly turbulent cast.^{[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. Paul Schiavo wrote that C minor is a key "that Beethoven associated with pathos, struggle, and expressive urgency."

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

Pianist and scholar Charles Rosen writes:

Beethoven in C minor has come to symbolize his artistic character. In every case, it reveals Beethoven as a Hero. C minor does not show Beethoven at his most subtle, but it does give him to us in his most extrovert form, where he seems to be most impatient of any compromise.

A characteristic 19th-century view is that of the musicologist George Grove, writing in 1898:

The key of C minor occupies a peculiar position in Beethoven's compositions. The pieces for which he has employed it are, with very few exceptions, remarkable for their beauty and importance.

Grove's view could be said^{[citation needed]} to reflect the view of many participants in the Romantic age of music, who valued Beethoven's music above all for its emotional force.