Für Elise is one of the most recognizable pieces of music on earth, yet it was never published in Beethoven’s lifetime, surfaced only in 1867 through researcher Ludwig Nohl, and the manuscript he copied has since vanished. This episode examines that missing piece of paper and everything that hangs on it: Luca Chiantore’s argument that Nohl may have stitched the piece together from fragments, Barry Cooper’s counter-evidence from sketches in Bonn, and the fierce scholarly argument over whether a single note in bar seven should be an E or a D.

We then run through the lineup of candidates for Elise. Therese Malfatti, the student Beethoven proposed to in 1810, whose collection held the manuscript, and whose name may have been misread from Beethoven’s chaotic handwriting. Elisabeth Röckel, a young soprano who really was called Elise by those close to her. And Elise Barensfeld, a 13-year-old prodigy living across the street from Therese, for whom the piece may have been a teaching exercise. We explore Johannes Quack’s theory that the opening E, D-sharp, E oscillation spells out E-S-E in German notation, Beethoven’s 1822 revision, and how a 200-year-old rondo ended up on Taiwanese garbage trucks, Sri Lankan bread carts, and Nokia ringtones.

• How rondo form works and why its A-B-A-C-A structure feels like walking through a house
• Why enharmonic equivalence lets D-sharp stand in for E-flat in a musical cipher
• The Royal Conservatory’s level seven rating and why the piece sits in the intermediate zone
• Mina Yang’s research on why the opening cuts through street noise and loops endlessly
• What else in the history books might rest on a single misplaced sheet of paper