Ludwig van Beethoven

Abstract This is the ultimate story of a missed deadline. So, first a calendar, amazing and fascinating: Late summer of 1818: Beethoven, stone deaf and soon to turn fortyeight, finishes his “Hammerklavier” Sonata, op. 106. The completion of this, his greatest work so far, begins the process that Maynard Solomon in his Beethoven biography describes as the composer’s “reconstructing his life and completing his life’s work.” In his remaining eight and a half years he will compose his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public works and his most esoteric, his biggest pieces and his most compressed, compositions that celebrate the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and others that propose utterly new approaches, works that are totally centered alongside a few that approach the bizarre. At no previous stage in Beethoven’s life would the sheer comprehensiveness and multiplicity of the Missa solemnis have been possible.