The crime novel on the 250th birthday of the master composer

When the young palace administrator Sebastian Reiser arrives in Vienna, the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven is preparing for the premiere of his ninth symphony. The whole city is eagerly awaiting the concert in the Kärntnertortheater. But the performance is controversial. Not only among conservative music enthusiasts, but also among banned fraternities. Reiser has the chance to play in the orchestra and gets caught in a dangerous web of intrigue and secret politics.

It is one of the most successful pieces of music of all times, still omnipresent today. Marking the peak of classical music, Beethoven's 9th Symphony was already regarded as groundbreaking during the composer's lifetime, but it was also controversial from the very beginning. In the conservative Metternich era, it was considered by many to be too radical. Beethoven's revolutionary act of incorporating a choir into a symphony met with widespread incomprehension among traditionalists. If Mozart was the greatest pop star in music history, Beethoven was its greatest rock idol - maladjusted, driven, choleric and always in search of a new musical and social order.

On the occasion of the 250th birthday of the composer, who was born in Bonn and moved more than 50 times during his life, music journalist, classical expert and crime writer Oliver Buslau dedicates a novel to the brilliant and exceptional composer, that centres on the secrets of the last completed symphony. The story about a spy, who actually does not want to be a spy and tries to fathom the riddle of Beethoven's deafness, revives the premiere of the composer's most famous work against the background of political unrest in Vienna during Metternich's time. The author skilfully links the social circumstances with a dramatic criminal case, always imbued with Beethoven's masterpiece and thirst for freedom.