Here We (Will) Go Again

In case you didn't know, Beethoven had a hard time in his love life. To be fair, he didn't really help himself either. Let's unpack.

In 1801, Beethoven got himself a new piano student named Giulietta Guicciardi, a 16-year-old countess. He immediately got infatuated with her. It's hard to tell if the feelings were reciprocated, but feelings or not, back then it's not like women's thoughts mattered anyway.

So Beethoven, a 31-year-old man (ugh), dedicated to her what is known today as the "Moonlight Sonata." How romantic? Except the song wasn't written for her. Beethoven didn't even really like the song. He kind of gave it to her because he had a spare dedication lying around and nothing better to offer. To sum up: we're dealing with a 31-year-old, equivalent of a freelancer, no stable income, unknown outside musical circles and going deaf who thought he'd court a 16-year-old countess by giving her a song he didn't care about.

What could go wrong?

He asked her to marry him and Giulietta's parents basically said "no, thanks." Or in early 19th century aristocratic terms:

"[...Bethoveen, a man...] without rank, fortune or permanent engagement; a man, too, of character and temperament so peculiar, and afflicted with the incipient stages of an infirmity which, if not arrested and cured, must deprive him of all hope of obtaining any high and remunerative official appointment and at length compel him to abandon his career as the great pianoforte virtuoso.[...can't marry our daugher]"

Let me translate it to gen Alpha terms:

Lowkey broke, unhinged, going deaf, no bag, no title, no future. It's giving unemployed. Next.

Giulietta married instead Count Wenzel Robert Gallenberg, a composer history remembers exclusively as 'the other guy'.

The piece was also not named by Beethoven — remind you of something? Für Elise was also not named by him, and was also written for a student he had feelings for. He really didn't learn from his mistakes, did he? The original title was Sonata quasi una Fantasia — "sonata almost a fantasy." The moonlight nickname came from Ludwig Rellstab, a German poet and music critic who wrote in 1832 that the first movement reminded him of "a boat floating on Lake Lucerne by moonlight". Beethoven had been dead for five years and couldn't object. Convenient.

Three Movements, Three Personalities, One Identity Crisis

The Moonlight Sonata has three movements, and they have absolutely nothing to say to each other.

The first, the famous one, the one you already know — is slow, dark, and relentless. Berlioz called it a lamentation. Czerny called it a ghost scene. Your brain calls it "the sad piano song from that movie." Everybody is right.

Then Beethoven, apparently deciding that was enough of that, writes a second movement that is cheerful. A gentle little dance, almost playful, the musical equivalent of someone cracking a joke at a funeral. Franz Liszt described it as "a flower between two abysses". What it actually sounds like is Beethoven briefly remembering that life contains things other than suffering, then immediately thinking better of it.

Because the third movement arrives like a door being kicked off its hinges. Marked "Presto agitato" or "Fast and Agitated", in case the kick wasn't clear enough — it is two and a half minutes of pure controlled fury. This is the movement that snapped the piano strings at the premiere. This is Beethoven at 31, going deaf, rejected, playing so hard he broke the instrument with his bare hands.

If you think you have what it takes, the 3 movements can be played on Vitzik.

The Irony of History

The Sonata's identity crisis didn't end with Beethoven's three movements. A century later, its name would be hijacked for something far darker than a bad breakup.

On the night of November 14th, 1940, nearly 500 Luftwaffe bombers launched the most concentrated attack on a British city of the entire Second World War. The target was Coventry. The operation's codename — chosen because the German high command needed a clear moonlit night to navigate by — was "Operation Moonlight Sonata." The raid lasted 11 hours. The Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries, and 50 landmines. Afterwards, Nazi propagandists were so pleased with the level of destruction that they coined a new German verb: "coventrieren", meaning to raze a city to the ground.

Beethoven was politically one of the most progressive figures of his era, a child of the Enlightenment, obsessed with liberty, brotherhood, and the dignity of the individual. He famously dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, then furiously scratched the dedication out when Napoleon declared himself Emperor, because he couldn't stand watching a liberator become just another tyrant.

He would have been horrified to know his song had been associated with a slaughter operation.