7 Bagatellen for piano, Op. 33
11 Bagatellen for Piano, Op. 119
Bagatelle in A minor, WoO 59, "Für Elise"
6 Bagatellen for Piano, Op. 126

A genius is also interesting in his little details. And what seems small on the outside does not necessarily have to be so. As not only pianist Christoph Scheffelt thinks, the Bagatelles, for example, are among the remarkable piano works of Ludwig van Beethoven.However, Beethoven by no means used the genre solely for experimental purposes. As "occasional compositions", the pieces also had to meet the expectations of publishers and buyers:

entertaining, easy to play, suitable for piano lessons. Beethoven was not always able to follow these marketable criteria. With the radically aphoristic Bagatelles op. 119, for example, he initially met with incomprehension from his publisher. The works were nevertheless successful with a musically active audience. Each individual Bagatelle has its own musical characteristics, and the spectrum ranges from the lyrical-song-like cantabile to the sometimes elegantly swinging, sometimes primeval and austere dance to the robust motoric Presto. Grace and wrath, wit and melancholy, soft and brusque suddenly meet and clash with each other.

There is something for every musical temperament: for subtle sound poets, for provocative eccentrics, for noble and brilliant virtuosos and for bold avant-gardists. In his approach, the Swiss pianist Christoph Scheffelt tries to find a synthesis of all these interpretative approaches and to find the appropriate, individual tone for each bagatelle. It is important to him that in some details even future musical developments are anticipated. When Beethoven said goodbye to his instrument, the piano, with the group of works op. 126, which he certified as "cyclic", this was at the same time a caesura, a departure for new peaks in the composer's later works.