What do you think?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/deus-ex-musica (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/deus-ex-musica)
("Forget about Beethoven...you've got Stockhausen now." - Miles Davis)
"what i shit is better than anything you have ever thought"
whoa
There's a lot of stuff in the article that is on the surface a review of a whole bunch of newish books on Beethoven. The question whether veneration of Beethoven has stifled successors is not really treated in any detail.
I think there are many aspects to this. On the one hand, the "shadow" of Beethoven was reportedly huge, even for Brahms many decades later. On the other hand he was also liberating, giving an example to go for extremely ambitious and original things in music. Probably Berlioz was foolhardy enough by himself, but Beethoven's example certainly helped him. Similarly Wagner.
Of the great composer's most obviously in the "shadow", Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and maybe Liszt, I see no obvious stifling. Sure, Schumann wrote some of his most original music in "new forms" hardly treated by Beethoven, that is cycles of shorter and rather free piano pieces. But I could not say whether his orchestral and chamber music is better or worse for Beethoven's example.
Schubert was closest in space and time, but so different in temperament and bold enough in his last years not to fall into a trap of closely imitating Beethoven.
Young Mendelssohn was so brilliantly gifted that in the few cases he worked with Beethovenian examples like in the quartets opp.12+13 the results are not Beethovenian at all.
And a composer like Chopin more or less ignored Beethoven completely and went a very different way.
Without having read the linked article, my immediate reaction is that "Beethoven-veneration" has not stifled the great composers; if anything, his example emboldened them "to explore strange new worlds" of sound. :) It's many of the music fans who take his style for Sacred Gospel, including, sadly, many orchestra-board members. ::)
(When I say "music fans," I'm thinking of analogues to lots of sports fans who can recite statistics and pontificate about how e.g. the 1927 Yankees were the greatest team in history but who have never thrown a ball or swung a bat to any real purpose.)
The better composers obviously weren't stifled much, and I suppose that's all that matters to us now as the lesser stuff falls by the wayside over time.