My earliest memory of Beethoven is that of a charming storybook by Barbara Nichol, Beethoven Lives Upstairs. I must have been no older than six or seven that some kindly teacher read this fairytale to us, of a misunderstood, stormy, eccentric genius who conducted a premiere of his monumental symphony in deafness, a weird neighbor who bathed by the window and scribbled on the walls of his apartment. In the years since, I have gotten to know his music, life, and personage a little better, though have never quite been able to dispel the patina of fiction: with everything about him being constantly debated, corrected, affirmed, rethought, he has become more myth to me than man. How strange it is that his music should seem more real to me than anything I might know of him or his life.

And even the “fact” of the music is shrouded in contradictions, sometimes about what Beethoven “really meant”. Forceful but not violent; humorous, but in a serious way; absurdly fast, but not rushed; maybe more pedal here, but no, not like that. I imagine Beethoven single-handedly prying open for the Western world the doors of liberated Romantic expression, behind which history has built yet new doors of “proper” style and requisites. Should young people even play the sonatas? How strange too that his music, so revered as a vessel of unrestrained individual feeling, should be so saddled with all the baggage of his own legacy, fairytales included.