Moonlight Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2)

Beethoven didn't call it the Moonlight Sonata. He called it 'Sonata quasi una Fantasia,' and he dedicated it to a seventeen-year-old countess named Giulietta Guicciardi with whom he was catastrophically in love. She was his piano student. He was thirty, increasingly deaf, and socially awkward in a way that his biographers describe diplomatically and his contemporaries described less so. She married a count two years later. Beethoven kept a miniature portrait of her in a secret drawer for the rest of his life, along with two other portraits of women who rejected him. The man collected heartbreaks like other people collect stamps.

The name 'Moonlight' came five years after Beethoven's death, when a German critic named Ludwig Rellstab compared the first movement to moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne. Beethoven, who had specific and aggressive opinions about everything, would almost certainly have hated this description. The first movement isn't moonlight. It's grief. It's the sound of lying in the dark at 3 AM knowing that the person you want doesn't want you back. The relentless triplet rhythm in the right hand is a heartbeat that won't let you sleep.

Everyone knows the first movement. Almost nobody talks about the third movement, which is one of the most violently intense pieces of piano music Beethoven ever wrote — a storm of arpeggios and crashing chords that sounds like the emotional dam breaking after the first movement's restrained suffering. Beethoven's student Carl Czerny said the third movement was inspired by a galloping horse heard at night. More likely it was inspired by rage — at Giulietta, at his deafness, at a universe that distributed talent and happiness with no apparent correlation.

Beethoven himself was annoyed that the Moonlight became his most popular sonata. He thought his Sonata No. 23, the 'Appassionata,' was far superior. The public disagreed, which is the kind of thing that happened to Beethoven constantly. The man wanted to be loved for his complexity. The world loved him for his broken heart.