This is for those who know what “death of the author” means or who is willing to look it up, but in short, it can summed up to mean “whatever a work of fiction means is up to the people to decide on”.
Question inspired by an incident the other day where I saw someone one day cite “death of the author” when asked why he went into the womens’ bathroom, saying “you keep saying the symbol on the door is a stick figure in a dress, but I look at it and see a stick figure in a cape, and so I entered because I’m super.”
Which is the why of picking Beethoven rather than a contemporary or post-WWII artist: so as to not digress into an uninteresting debate about whether Hitler liked Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite (which he was, among other things). I tried for a relatively uncontroversial figure with no relation to Naziism by sheer fact of predating the movement and no other association.