Music Hath Charms: Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and the Ladies

I had never thought about it quite like this!  (Via lovely Ninme.) Bonus: it's written by James May from one of my favorite shows, "Top Gear." Here's a blurb:

There is a very good reason why the first movement of the so-called Moonlight Sonata has become one of the most famous pieces in the entire pianoforte canon. It was dedicated by Beethoven on a particularly bad herr day to his pupil, the Countess Julie Guicciardi, a young woman for whom the tousle-headed tunesmith was suffering an all-consuming, utterly debilitating but ultimately unrequited love. And it shows. This is not so much a piece of music as an annotation of an affair of the heart; the means by which Beethoven exorcised his soul of accumulated lust and despair. “Even today, 200 years later, its ferocity is astonishing,” said the music theorist Charles Rosen.

In fact, some pianists have gone so far as to say that it is possible to play this seminal work convincingly only if you are, in fact, in love, and that the sensitive listener will understand, at a visceral level, the torment of the performer simply from the tenderness of his phrasing. When well executed, Moonlight Sonata is a highly protracted act of foreplay.

This is precisely why you should learn to play it.