Worlds upon worlds, strange constellations, collisions, destruction and creation, coherent laws and mysterious forces: the cosmos of Beethoven’s piano sonatas is in movement, a “work in progress” or as Beethoven’s favourite philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “always occupied with bringing forth new things and new worlds”. Beethoven internalized this revolutionary, dynamic new world view, and it also forms the basis for his creative aesthetic: from the three sonatas Op.2 dedicated to Haydn and rooted in the Classical tradition to the final movement of Op.111, where the “artless song” of the Arietta undergoes a unique process of rhythmic transformation in which it seems to be completely liberated from time and space. The critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, who was sympathetic to Beethoven, was no longer able to follow, but still found the fitting words for this final point of culmination: “At the end of the finite, the eternal reveals itself.”