The intellectual task he set himself was to work out a new and personal way of moving his music forward. Amid his popular compositions were already one or two that presaged a more radical style, especially the ‘Grande Sonate Pathétique’ for piano, Op. 13 of 1797–1798 that epitomized the stormy significance the key of C minor held for him. It still adhered largely to the basic structure of sonata form, but nobody else could possibly have written it. The work’s passionate nature established him in the Viennese press as a Tonkünstler or ‘artist in sound’, significantly a description Beethoven preferred to that of ‘composer’.

Perhaps even more important to his stylistic development were the two Op. 27 piano sonatas (1800–1801). He described each as ‘quasi una fantasia’, and there are few remnants of traditional sonata form in either. The second one in C sharp minor became known as the ‘Moonlight’ after the poet Ludwig Rellstab regrettably thought it conjured up ‘a boat in moonlight’. This did wonders for the piece’s celebrity while traducing the earnestness of the composer’s intentions, which were surely not banally pictorial, for all the reflectiveness of the first movement and the passion of the last. The work seems to have been written under the influence of Beethoven’s infatuation with a student of his, the seventeen-year-old Countess Julie Guicciardi. Certainly it was dedicated to her. Despite his occasional pretensions to having aristocratic blood (so much for his proclaimed egalitarianism: a legal case later in his life obliged him to admit that the ‘van’ in his name was not the equivalent of the German ‘von’), Beethoven was a commoner. His passing passions for aristocratic women were never going to lead anywhere, but an implied romance with a young countess undoubtedly helped this sonata’s nearly instant fame. Both its first movement, as well as the entire companion sonata in E flat major, have an improvisatory quality that Beethoven’s contemporaries would have recognized from his public performances but would not have expected in a published sonata. The ‘Moonlight’ in particular inhabited a dreamy musical realm no one had encountered before, and its first movement had the additional attraction that any amateur pianist could get his or her fingers around the notes and play it with suitably swooning demeanour. Not for nothing was this movement the party piece of E. F. Benson’s fictional Lucia, endlessly performed for her variously fawning and catty listeners at one of her soirées in Riseholme. And, like Lucia herself, many an amateur has judiciously abandoned any attempt to play the much more demanding last movement within anyone’s hearing.