At first reluctant to make recordings, by the 1930s the great pianist Artur Schnabel fully accepted the new technology. His recordings of Beethoven’s piano music include all the numbered sonatas, originally issued on subscription by the Beethoven Sonata Society. Given his status as the leading Beethoven specialist of his time (or perhaps ever), each disc became the subject of intense scrutiny. The recordings of the sonatas on the present disc received closer attention than most, Schnabel’s interpretation of the ‘Waldstein’ sonata prompting the critic Robert A. Hall, Jr. to comment, “to this technical mastery Schnabel adds and fuses what is all too rare a quality: an intensely intelligent (not merely ‘intellectual’) mind… The result is a perfectly blended interpretation of the music as a spiritual expression and as a musical organism.” In his insistence on recording all thirty-two Sonatas, Schnabel left a statement that influenced how we understand and appreciate many of Beethoven’s works.