All these chamber pieces form an illustration of something Beethoven said more than once: he based all his pieces on a story or an image and wrote the music to fit it. Recall the Romeo and Juliet backstory in his first string quartet. But in all but a few cases, Beethoven as a matter of policy did not tell the world what his model stories were. They were his own business, another part of his workshop that he did not want the world snooping in. He wanted his listeners to write their own stories, their own poems, to his work. Which is to say that he was too wise in his art to compromise one of
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