Who composed the Moonlight Sonata?

Beethoven, in 1801, and he did not call it that. His title was Sonata quasi una fantasia - a sonata in the manner of a fantasy - and the moonlight came from a critic five years after his death, who compared the first movement to moonlight on Lake Lucerne. The name stuck so hard that the piece is now almost impossible to hear without it.

That first movement is the famous one and it is not the piece. It is marked to be played very quietly throughout and without pause into a short, almost jaunty second movement, and then a third that is violent and fast - Beethoven's instruction is presto agitato. The whole point of the structure is that he put the weight at the end rather than the beginning, which was unusual, and audiences who know only the opening have heard the setup and not the payoff.

He was 30 and beginning to go deaf when he wrote it, and dedicated it to a 19-year-old pupil, Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he appears to have been in love and whom he could not have married across the class line. He complained in later life that everyone played the first movement and nobody the rest, which remains true two centuries on.