Oh you fools! How did you imagine that?

To humanity – or whoever among you still possesses a listening heart!

The year was 1827 when I let the curtain fall – Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est! I called out to the world, ready to face eternal silence. But now – what a cruel play of providence! I have been torn from the peace of the grave in January 2026, rudely hurled into a time more alien to me than the deepest dissonance. A band of audacious spirits – painters, comedians, scribblers – demands of me to repeat the journey I undertook in 1796.

Oh you fools! How did you imagine that?

I wander through the streets of Vienna and find no stone on which my spirit can rest. Everything is noise! A noise I cannot grasp with my ears – God has long closed this gate to me –, yet I feel it as an unbearable tremor in my bones, shaking my soul. Indeed, these treacherous devices are pressed into my hand, you call them Internet and WhatsApp, but what are they compared to a pen and a pure sheet of paper? I have no piano to tame my anger.

Where are the princes who still honor art? Where is a patron who does not merely ask about utility? I stand here, without a roof, without a penny, a stranger in my own homeland.

I am not well.

My heart, which always ignited for the true and beautiful, freezes in this cold splendor. It seems to me that humanity has not matured over the years – it still acts far below its dignity! My feeling draws me away from this colorful frenzy, back to the quiet land where art is not a slave to technology.

Help me – or let me go again!

Ludwig van Beethoven