So, to the end of a very long road. It was three years ago that Andras Schiff embarked on his marathon cycle of Beethoven sonatas - more than usually demanding because he's been lecturing about them in parallel with performing all 32.
Once more the Wigmore Hall was full. Once more he began with his customary apology for trying to put into words what most pianists are content to leave to their fingers. This time he was dealing with the three late masterpieces, opus 109, 110 and 111, which he performs tonight in the same hall. With the last sonata he recommended the audience should, rather than listen to him, read Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus which, he said, was the "most beautiful and valid" description of the last movement - which was itself "one of the wonders of mankind".
He began with an overview of the three sonatas, which the sketchbooks showed Beethoven was working on at the same time. They were, he thought, packed with religious allusions and drew heavily on associations with Bach's sacred music and Beethoven's own Missa Solemnis (the Credo so similar to the theme of the opus 109 variations). "You're entitled to your own beliefs, or lack of them," he told the audience, "but you have to get on Beethoven's wavelength."
As on previous occasions, his fluency, memory and scholarship held the audience pretty much in thrall for more than two hours, pausing only once for a sip of water. He speaks subjectively about the story the music is telling: for him the Arioso and Fugue from opus 110 are about a man who has had a desperately close encounter with death. He can virtually chart the state of Beethoven's health from bar to bar. No one can say if he's right or wrong: it was a satisfying narrative for the music, if not necessarily convincing.
Frustratingly, he doesn't speak much about the technical challenges in the music. How difficult is it to play the octave trills in the sixth variation of opus 109? He gives no hints on technique. But there are the odd swipe at other - nameless - pianists, usually for playing pieces too slowly "in order to be taken more seriously."
And there was one gloriously mischievous aside at pianists who misunderstood one particular tempo instruction (etwas langsamer) in the fugue of opus 110. Why, he said, it had even been the subject of a long correspondence in the New York Review of Books between Alfred Brendel and the pianist/critic Charles Rosen. Pause. "I'm afraid Charles Rosen won with a knock-out."
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