Actually, the real hero of these three weeks is not Barenboim. It is Beethoven himself. I am painfully aware that anything I try to write about the 32 sonatas is bound to be banal, because no one's words can do justice to the imaginative range of the music that Beethoven conjured for the keyboard over his lifetime. So I will take refuge in something that the pianist Louis Kentner once wrote. The Beethoven piano sonatas, said Kentner, should be presented to the first Martian visitor to our planet as proof of what human civilisation is capable of. Here, friend, we should say to the little green men. This is the best of us.