Excerpt from the book “Moonlight Sonatas for Beethoven”

Name a tune you want to listen to again and again, because it goes straight to the heart. Millions on the internet click “Moonlight Sonata” in response to this call. At the same time, both the title and the history of this work have long been subjects of debate. The fact is that Beethoven reversed the conventional sequence of the first and the second movement, thus breaking with the classical sonata form, which may explain this word choice of “fantasy” in the original title. Based on this idea, 69 artists from 26 countries got together at the occasion of Beethoven’s 250th birthday and – with boundless sensitivity – interpreted the “Moonlight Sonata” in visual terms. Was it not the image of a landscape, after all, that led to the work’s famous epithet?