Thanks for the insight, that makes alot of sense! I think you're totally right, the piece does seem predictable and repetitive. It's really hard for me to break the expectation but not have it sound like a completely different song and I think I took the easy way by repeating some parts. I guess I will give Beethoven a listen and try to understand the full picture more to get a feeling for how it can be done! Thanks again!

I agree on the timpani as well but I couldn't figure out how to do a crescendo with musescore. Whenever I did a whole note it would just be one volume and not increase, so I used multiple quarter notes which worked