I’m emerging from two years of intense research. It feels as if I’ve travelled in a time capsule which has taken me on a bewildering voyage. I’ve zapped back and forth throughout the nineteenth century with a few escapes over the edge, into the last quarter of the eighteenth century, totally immersed in adventures which are directly and indirectly linked to Ludwig van Beethoven.

The sheer quantity of anecdotes which have been told and repeated about the composer is astronomical.  There is enough information and disinformation out there to get totally lost. Great are the perils of adding to the big heap of assertions which at times are based on thin proof and isolated testimonials. What is there to add which really makes sense and may be of some use to us? Isn’t it enough when musicians interpret the music Beethoven composed? I asked myself these questions over and over again at the beginning of my journey. Trust me now when I say that indeed there is something worth delving into, that there is something fundamentally important which remains unsaid, and bear with me until we are both, you and I, ready to elaborate on this topic.

Imagine a huge and extremely tangled ball of yarn, of which I caught one extremity in a moment of casual curiosity, while I was writing a rather daunting research paper titled the Impossible Note (part II) or where Beethoven tells us what we don’t want to see.[i]  I started playing with it softly, not just pulling on it. In an unguarded moment the first incredible knot unfolded and I held on tight. After that, time and again I thought I had reached the ultimate knot, the truly impossible one, and was certain to call it a stop. But a staggering and most frightening amount of bizarre facts, coincidences, discrepancies and leads would sometimes fall into place overnight. Gradually, after hours of panic and doubt when I tumbled from illusion to disillusion and back again, they unveiled a real life story.

Faced with the vast confusion of historical material, one can never be entirely comprehensive. But the time is now, the moment has come to invite you for a ride, into this time machine. Do not worry, we will return and when we do, we will not be empty-handed. I will lead the way through an intricate amount of plots and sub-plots of a story which has been waiting in the shadows of many years, lives and fates, its information fragmented, sometimes coded and always thoroughly dispersed. Certainly, its multiple spin-offs have lead creative lives of their own. Nonetheless, at the core is a truth which, without any doubt, is wanting to be told and shared.

 I’ve filled pages of annotations, tables with stacks of references and my pc with gigabytes. However, I do not intend to serve up a meal of dry research. I believe this blog is the appropriate forum for a series of stories and as we go you will discover how they link to Beethoven. It is a way of taking you with me on a quest. I will however add a little sauce and natural glue here and there, even some images, to make sure you thoroughly enjoy the time wandering this path. I promise great discoveries and more, something undefinable for now.

 Are you up to it? Join me for an adventure, starting with a first episode on March 9^th, 2018.

 BeeBlog will publish a new feature every three weeks. Please refer to Stein 1802 project’s Facebook page for the dates.

 Wishing you all a very fruitful and exciting new year,