Apart from the social stigma, he knew that it would probably end his brilliant performing career. He became reclusive, afraid of what people would say when they learned that Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso was going deaf. He feared the situation was irreversible and tried to keep it secret. For the previous four years, he’d been suffering from tinnitus, a ringing and buzzing in his ears, and was having trouble discerning high notes.

Now Beethoven was encouraging me to mourn, hypnotizing me with doleful, dronelike melody. Both my parents had recently died, but with a heavy workload and my childhood home to sell, I hadn’t given myself time to grieve.

” I’d heard the sorrowful first movement before, but it suddenly touched me differently.

When I got home from lunch, I listened to Maurizio Pollini play the “Moonlight. Though I’d studied piano for 12 years, my teacher thought Beethoven’s music was too “agitating” for someone with my “high-strung” temperament. Wagner once described Beethoven as a “titan, wrestling with the gods.” Did I want to wrestle with a titan? I’d never written historical fiction, didn’t read German and knew nothing about early-19th-century Vienna. The editor thought it would make a good novel. She was the woman to whom the great master had dedicated the “Moonlight” Sonata.

The sets are designed by Laurence Irving (grandson of Henry Irving) and they are large and handsome in a very 1930s 'modern' way.Four years ago, I was having lunch with an editor who mentioned that Beethoven had fallen in love with one of his piano students. The story is sentimental, but everyone seems to enter into it with great energy. The script gives her virtually nothing to do, but she makes an extraordinary impression and it's easy to imagine, watching her timing, the beautiful gestures and the lovely cadences of her voice (remember, she was a pupil of the great singing teacher Manuel Garcia) what a sensational stage performer she must have been. The other reason for seeing the film is the performance by Dame Marie Tempest as the Swedish Countess, into whose castle the people who have been in the plane crash are invited. The main question hanging over this film is - how did it come to be made? How did they ever persuade Paderewski to take part? He speaks his lines very slowly, but with impressive dignity - he is playing himself - and the overhead shots of his hands as he plays the Beethoven, Chopin and Paderewski selections are marvellous.

Moonlight sonata