While a number of Beethoven's piano sonatas have titles (authentic or otherwise), Op. 81a is the only one to have a concrete extra-musical inspiration: the flight from Vienna of his patron the ...

So wrote Beethoven from the Austrian spa town of ... he spent the rest of the summer working on two piano sonatas, Op. 54 and Op. 57. He went for long walks in the nearby Vienna Woods, one of ...

Today there are many artists who have recorded and performed all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, two of whom are Daniel Barenboim and Richard Goode. Beethoven wrote the Pathétique just as he was ...