Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
1801 · Work
A sonata that breaks the rules by opening with its slow movement — a quiet triplet murmur Beethoven marked 'quasi una fantasia' and dedicated to a seventeen-year-old pupil he could not marry. A critic's moonlight-on-a-lake image, coined after the composer's death, gave it the name he never chose and a fame he grumbled about: 'surely I've written better things.'
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Around 1801
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