In the world of “Peanuts,” of course, Schroeder was the Beethoven- obsessed music nerd who lost patience when Lucy interrupted his practice and who called time-outs as a baseball catcher to share composer trivia with the pitcher. Yet musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more than a punch line to Charles Schulz (More articles about Charles M. Schulz.) [1]'s invocation of Beethoven's music.
“If you don't read music and you can’t identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning,” said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed “Peanuts” strips.
Via news from me [2], “Listening to Schroeder: “Peanuts” Scholars Find Messages in Cartoons Scores [3]”
I had always assumed that Charles Schulz [4] copied the music into his strips instead of just making it up, and I also assumed it was, in fact, Beethoven [5]. So it doesn't surprise me all that much that he matched the music to the strip.
[1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/charles_
[2] https://boston.conman.org/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/arts/design/14pean.html?_r=2&part
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Schulz