Für Elise is perhaps the most famous piece in piano literature. Completed in 1810, the piece remained unknown until it was discovered in 1865 by a German music scholar among the papers of Therese von Droßdik, née Malfatti – a pupil of Beethoven, with whom he fell in love and to whom he proposed and was rejected. The music is all artless simplicity, a gentle flow of semi and demi-semiquavers, touching and sincere. Boris Giltburg’s album of Piano Concerto No. 5 ‘Emperor’ with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko, and the original piano reduction of the Piano Concerto No. 0, WoO 4, is available on 8.574153.