D) to his friend Krumpholz (a violinist). Shortly afterward there
appeared the sonatas (now op. 31) in which a partial fulfillment
of his resolution may be observed.")

87. "Read Shakespeare's 'Tempest.'"

(An answer to Schindler's question as to what poetical conceit
underlay the sonatas in F minor. Beethoven used playfully to
call the little son of Breuning, the friend of his youth, A&Z,
because he employed him often as a messenger.)

["Schindler relates that when once he asked Beethoven to tell
him what the F minor and D minor (op. 31, No. 2) meant, he
received for an answer only the enigmatical remark: 'Read
Shakespeare's "Tempest."' Many a student and commentator has
since read the 'Tempest' in the hope of finding a clew to the
emotional contents which Beethoven believed to be in the two
works, so singularly associated, only to find himself baffled.
It is a fancy, which rests, perhaps, too much on outward things,
but still one full of suggestion, that had Beethoven said: 'Hear
my C minor symphony,' he would have given a better starting-
point to the imagination of those who are seeking to know what
the F minor sonata means. Most obviously it means music, but it
means music that is an expression of one of those psychological
struggles which Beethoven felt called upon more and more to
delineate as he was more and more shut out from the companionship
of the external world. Such struggles are in the truest sense of
the word tempests. The motive, which, according to the story,
Beethoven himself said, indicates, in the symphony, the rappings
of Fate at the door of human existence, is common to two works