Not to squeeze the analogy until it screams, but there is something auspicious in the fact that Beethoven’s First Piano Sonata starts with the musical device called a “Mannheim skyrocket.” A rising staccato arpeggio, the skyrocket was a Mozart trademark, appearing most famously at the start of the last movement of his G-minor Symphony (K. 550). Beethoven’s note-for-note (except for the key) appropriation amounts to a cry of “the king is dead, long live the king”—after this six-note figure, Beethoven abandons Mozart and is henceforth engaged in building his own kingdom.

If it is true that a prime indication of genius is the establishment and development of an original style, Beethoven shows his cards very early on, even though homage to musical ancestors is still occasionally paid. The skyrocket also signals the beginning of a body of piano music that, in the words of the pianist Denis Matthews, “illustrate[s] to perfection the almost infinite resource and flexibility of a chosen musical form in the hands of a composer of genius.” In his youth, Beethoven was perhaps the greatest pianist in Europe, and, like his successor to the title, Franz Liszt, he used the piano as the primary means of his musical expression. The thirty-two sonatas for piano, written over the course of his career, are milestones in Beethoven’s musical, spiritual, and emotional life. The nine symphonies themselves can be regarded as a species of supersonata.

If not rare, live performances of the entire cycle are