Lost in Beethoven

A musical labyrinth based on Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas

For more than two hundred years, composers have been trying to escape from under Beethoven’s shadow.

Lost in Beethoven takes the opposite approach: it invites the audience to get lost in Beethoven instead.

Pianist and composer Mathias Halvorsen turns Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas into a live musical maze, leading the audience from Sonata No. 1 towards the distant goal of No. 32. The route is not fixed. To move forward, the audience must solve a series of musical puzzles they can only solve by listening.

The performance begins with Sonata No. 1. From there, the possible ways forward are Nos. 2, 3 or 4. Whichever one is reached, the next crossroads leads towards Nos. 5, 6 or 7, and so the journey continues through Beethoven’s sonata cycle.

At each crossroads, something goes wrong.

Halvorsen reaches the end of a Beethoven movement and becomes trapped in a repeating musical loop. One audience member at a time may enter the performance space. Through movement, position, listening and experiment, the audience gradually discovers how the people in the room can change what is happening in the music — until the ending of one movement finds its way into the beginning of another.

And suddenly the way forward opens.

Halvorsen continues directly into the complete Beethoven movement the audience has unlocked.

At the heart of Lost in Beethoven are therefore substantial, complete movements from the piano sonatas, performed without alteration. The game does not replace the repertoire: it determines which repertoire will be heard.

Every note is by Beethoven.

This creates an unusual meeting between a highly participatory performance and some of the most ambitious music in the classical canon. There are no phones, projections, sensors or electronic systems mediating the experience. Only a pianist, a piano, Beethoven’s music and a room full of people trying to work out what happens next.

The rules of the evening are explained at the outset; the solutions are not. No knowledge of musical notation or Beethoven is required. Everything needed to solve the puzzles can be heard.

And the audience is not decorative. Without them, the concert cannot continue.

The relationship between composer, performer and listener is therefore slightly rearranged:

Beethoven determines the material.
The pianist must be prepared for every possible route.
The audience decides which route becomes real.

Halvorsen consequently prepares far more music than any one audience will ever hear. Every possible path has to exist before the concert begins; only one will become that evening’s performance.

That uncertainty is part of the musical idea.

Across the 32 sonatas, Beethoven repeatedly seems to ask the same question: where can this music go next? Again and again he stretches the sonata form, the possibilities of the piano and the scale of musical narrative, moving from the quick wit and classical proportions of the early works towards the increasingly strange and liberated world of the late sonatas.

Lost in Beethoven turns that development into a journey. Instead of being told how Beethoven changed, the audience travels through that change — repeatedly arriving at the end of one musical world and having to discover the entrance to the next.

The question facing them at every crossroads — where do we go from here? — is therefore not entirely foreign to Beethoven himself.

Part piano recital, part musical escape room and part collective experiment in listening, Lost in Beethoven combines unusually extensive audience participation with a great deal of uncompromising Beethoven.

It is not Beethoven made interactive so much as a Beethoven recital whose form cannot exist without its audience.

And because everything happens live, between the particular people gathered in the room, the performance can only happen once in exactly this way.

Lost in Beethoven was premiered at Beethovenfest Bonn in 2022, with performances at Victoriabad and Beethoven-Haus.

Next time, the way out will be different.