This year, I’m performing all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas. Here’s why

For the past several decades, little in my life as a professional pianist has been as constant as my relationship with Beethoven. It has been intense, immersive, impassioned, hugely demanding and hugely enriching. In the current season, though, it has become something it never was before: exclusive.

Let me explain. Like any serious piano student, I first began to work on one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas around the age of ten. From that point on, the work has never stopped. Beethoven’s music, in addition to its mastery, beauty and spirituality, has a force of personality perhaps unequalled by any other artist’s work in any medium or any era. For decades, he produced a steady stream of work that is by turns monumental, tender, metaphysical, uproarious and consoling — despite contending not only with deafness, but also with alcoholism, digestive problems and raging misanthropy. He was able to do so on account of an insatiable need to be heard, to express himself through music. It is that need I feel when I listen to his music, and that makes playing him seem like a matter of equal necessity.

This might sound like enough — enough work, enough fulfilment — for one person in one lifetime. But like most pianists, I am greedy. And thus, for the past 30 years, as I took in the Beethoven sonatas, I concurrently played Mozart’s piano concerti, with their kaleidoscopic, Shakespearean insight into humanity. I also played Schubert’s sonatas, massive essays on solitude; Schumann’s solo works, windows into his fragile, beautiful soul; the stunning aphorisms of Kurtág; and so much more. In spite of Beethoven’s magnificence, I saw no reason to choose.