Photo: Taidō Shūfū, Ensō (Nineteenth century). Detail. Hanging scroll; ink on paper. 11 1/16 in x 24 5/16 in. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Let’s talk about the last movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata. This is a very, very difficult thing to do. One, because you’re already thinking of this piece as a masterpiece, because who wouldn’t, faced with the connotations of that first sentence? And there is nothing that burdens music like knowledge of its greatness. In fact such an extensive mythos has accreted around the final movement of the Op.111 Sonata—re: its sacredness, its expressive power, its nibbling at the boundaries of what we think of as the sonata, or even art—that it’s sometimes very hard to listen to this piece as