Preface
One of my earliest musical memories is of listening to a friend of my parents, known to me only as Uncle Edward, play an ominous-sounding piece on the piano from a bound volume of music which for some mysterious reason seemed to live in our home. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time. Whenever Uncle Edward visited, I beseeched him to play the piece. Soon my interest extended to the book itself, which was called Beethoven Piano Sonatas volume 1. By this time I was playing the piano a little myself, and would spend hours pretending that I was reading from this volume, occasionally turning its pages as my hands struck meaningless notes.
When adolescence arrived, I spent far too many hours studying the manuscripts of the Beethoven sonatas, and listening to a keenly-priced boxed set of performances by the young Barenboim. I learned that Uncle Edward’s piece was the trio section of the minuet from the Sonata in E flat, Op 7. Soon, I discovered that the pinnacle of these 32 masterpieces was a sonata like no other, the Hammerklavier, Op 106. I have been fascinated by it ever since. This essay is an attempt to explain why. It was the first of my articles to garner any form of general recognition, the web-site The Knife and Me saying that the piece was “truly essential”.