"HONOR TO BEETHOVEN" was the motto that appeared at the top of a program, printed by the Beethoven Quartet Society, in 1845. 1 Over the course of eight weeks, the group of passionate London musicians mounted the first-ever survey of Beethoven's sixteen string quartets. The Society distributed scores for dedicated audience members to peruse; attendees were asked to arrive thirty minutes early so as not to disrupt the music. 2 The benefits of listening to a full set of sonatas, symphonies, or quartets are obvious: they paint a rich portrait of a composer's musical development, allowing connections to be heard across an artistic career. Biss spoke of Beethoven's sonatas as "twenty-five hours' worth of a private diary of a genius." For the interpreter, cycles offer an opportunity to grapple with repertoire on a grand scale. "The appeal of the Beethoven sonatas is that I won't come to the end of what fascinates me about them, or what puzzles me about them," Biss said. Yet, there is something puzzling about the classical fixation on cycles. Unlike Wagner's "Ring" or Schubert's "Winterreise," Beethoven's sonatas do not tell a singular, unified story. The composer did not know that he would write a ninth symphony when he composed his first. 3 These omnipresent cycles represent, instead, an outdated grouping—one made only in hindsight and informed by a shrewd combination of the Romantic ethos of classical music and the box-set mentality of the record industry. And, though they claim to embrace a wide swath of music, cycles are symptomatic of the past century's thinning of the repertory, one that has squeezed out much fascinating music and left behind only the most pre-sanctioned of classics. 4 The cyclic approach dates back to the end of Beethoven's life, when his music helped define the orchestral repertory, itself a new concept. In the early nineteenth century, a typical concert might include a single movement of a symphony as an overture, followed by a grab bag of shorter works for varying forces. Opera arias were often thrown into the mix. The piano recital as we know it did not exist. 5 Performing a Mozart or Haydn symphony in total was still a rare phenomenon; in Berlin, it was a minor miracle when Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was played four times within a single five-month stretch.