'It is the spirit which holds together noble and better men on this earth that is now addressed to you , Beethoven wrote thus to the dedicatee of the Sonata op. 109, the nineteen-year-old Maximiliane Brentano in 1821. Beethoven had already composed a little piano trio (B flat major WoO 39) for her in 1812. And now she was receiving a very different kind of work - the first of the heavyweight last three piano sonatas. It remains astounding that Beethoven initially wrote the first movement as a piano work in its own right, only later deciding to expand it into a complete sonata, which today appears to have been hewn from one piece of stone. / Piano
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