Late-period Beethoven, particularly his final string quartets, is often characterized as music that has turned inward, away from the heroic public proclamations of his middle years. These works frequently utilize fragmented melodies and unconventional structures that baffled his contemporaries. To Beethoven, who was by then profoundly deaf, these compositions were an exploration of his own internal spiritual and intellectual state, rather than an attempt to please a patron or a public. This move toward abstraction and subjective expression paved the way for the Romantic obsession with the individual's inner world, marking a bridge between Classical order and Romantic subjectivity.