beethoven.is

Magnús Lyngdal Magnússon is a historian, music critic and former trumpeter. For years he has collected complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies on CD and timed every single movement with his own stopwatch. On beethoven.is the collection is open to everyone.

The challenge

The material existed, but in one man’s tables and notebooks. The task was to make it searchable and comparable without losing what makes it valuable: these are the editor’s own measurements, not figures pulled from a streaming service. The editor also had to be able to maintain all of it himself.

The solution

• The whole collection in one system. 188 cycles, 141 conductors and 1,692 recordings. Every symphony has its page, every cycle has its page, and the timing tables sort by any column.
• Comparison. Two cycles side by side, movement by movement, with Bärenreiter urtext reference times for comparison.
• The editor’s voice. His own ranking of the best cycles, trivia and an errata list. The Icelandic section carries his 93 segments from Morgunvaktin on RÚV Rás 1 and the series Undir geislanum, all playable.
• Readable by people and machines. Pages work without JavaScript, every page also exists as Markdown, and the data can be downloaded as JSON or CSV. No cookies and no tracking.
• The editor owns the work. The editor adds cycles, covers and rankings himself and corrects what needs correcting. The site runs on our own infrastructure and stays up while a new release goes in.

The site was built at Sumarhús and went live on 14 October 2026.