It's on my mind because it introduced me to the remarkable Miss Grimaud, who appears on All Things Considered once again this week. The Corigliano piece, 'Fantasia on an Ostinato,' was based on the Allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh - as Grimaud would say, 'haunted by it.'

The pianist Helene Grimaud released an album called Credo, in which she played pieces by Beethoven, Aarvo Part and the American composer John Corigliano. Then, I heard the music that created critical mass in my mind for a story about the Beethoven theme and some of the music and musicians it has inspired. The least I could do was make some decent radio, but I wasn't sure how. After some research it turned out to be by Schubert, who was even more obsessed by this theme than I was and had made some wonderful music of his own out of it. Then I caught a moment of NPR's classical music program Performance Today, playing what struck my ear as a classical piano setting of the Beethoven theme. I was ambivalent about doing an interview with Loussier: the original theme was too important to me, and playing and discussing Loussier's music but not Beethoven's might sound trite. First, the jazz pianist Jacques Loussier released a CD of Variations on the theme. One week in the fall of 2003, the world seemed to be accompanied by a music that I love: the second movement, the Allegretto, from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

The French pianist Helene Grimaud brings the classics to a Berlin nightclub.

Beethoven 7th symphony release