Snow reflecting off the deep old walls framing the little windows made the room seem brighter, as bright as on a summer's day. But this is winter: cold, white cold; even the window glass appears petrified. Every word seems to escape from your mouth encased in a puff cloud of icy air.
The narrow lane outside the modest yellow house is marked by a couple of forlorn tracks; someone else had already trekked by, up towards an interesting looking gate that leads to a school.
But as I look out, trying to imagine what the view was like more than 200 hundred years ago for the troubled man who once stayed here, there is nothing, only a stoic robin walking up and down a neat pile of logs. Funny how there is always a robin waiting in these winter scenes.
It is early morning. The church bells are ringing. The couple I had met on the bus were not going to the service. They had been invited to a wine-tasting. They were Austrians from near the Swiss border who had moved to Vienna after living in Stockholm for six years. The man wore a silly fur hat; the woman was intent on mourning Sweden, so efficient, so clean. Vienna looked pretty clean to me. The couple were serious individuals: an economist and a microbiologist doing "pure research" - too serious for me to inform them that I had decided they were secret agents.
Wine had not brought me to Heiligenstadt, now a Northern suburb of Vienna. Beethoven had. In his day, it was a village where he had come in search of nature. Beethoven, who was born in Bonn and came to Vienna to fulfil his destiny, always felt an affinity with the countryside. Heiligenstadt offered him rural quiet and also the chance of a cure for his deafness. His affliction, particularly horrible for a musician, obsessed him. Battling to conceal it, he appeared rude and taciturn to others. It is not surprising that he contemplated suicide.
He came here in the summer of 1802 on medical advice, and quickly established a routine. He took his meals in the nearby heurigen, or taverns, where the customers drank the wines made from vines growing on the premises and no one ever asked for coffee. One heuriger in particular, just down the lane, was where he took his meals and wine. Later the staff spoke to me about Beethoven as if he had just left.
In the Beethoven haus, really just a two-roomed apartment, the wooden floor creaked. The ceiling was low. On one wall is a detailed, tinted print commemorating a historic event. It is Franz Stöumlaut's watercolour of Beethoven's funeral procession. More than 20,000 people gathered for it. Among the torchbearers was Schubert, already terminally ill. Beneath the picture is a desk with a few sets of earphones. Large handwritten sheets are encased in glass. Seated at that table listening to a man's voice reading words written by Beethoven to his brothers - and to posterity - is an eerie and unexpectedly moving experience. As the man's voice reads on, Beethoven's overwhelming loneliness and despair seem to fill the room.
This is the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, written on October 6th, 1802 but only found among Beethoven's papers after his death in 1827. It begins with the words: "For my brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven". But while he seems to be directly addressing his brothers, Beethoven may also have been speaking to mankind in general - a great deal depends on how you interpret the language. "O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do ye wrong me, you do not know the secret causes of my seeming. . .but reflect now that for six years I have been in a hopeless case, aggravated by senseless physicians, cheated year after year in the hope of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady. . .Born with an ardent and lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness."
Reading the letter, a determinedly literary outpouring, seems to explain so much about the Beethoven myth and his famously difficult personality. Despite his deafness he continued to compose as, after all, he could still hear the music in his head; but he could not conduct his work, nor could he, a piano virtuoso in his own right, perform in public.
Yet for all its despair it also shows Beethoven the romantic - not just the unrequited lover but also a romantic in the most cohesive sense of what Romanticism meant to the German artistic imagination.
Perhaps the testament was intended as a will, or even as a form of artistic manifesto. Certainly, the enduring sensation is of a deliberate, carefully written exercise of intent. Beethoven was no doubt suffering, and this suffering and deafness would persist until his death almost 25 years later. Yet the true inspiration of the document may well have been Beethoven's intention to look towards a fellow German who had also explored the themes of youthful despondency and despair. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, was to the late 18th and early 19th centuries a seminal articulation of romantic angst. Goethe survived Beethoven by some five years, dying in 1832 in a state of contentment never experienced by Beethoven.
Beethoven's death mask is kept in a case near the window. He had undergone four operations during his final months. He looks resigned. He died, aged 57, on March 26th, 1827 as a thunderstorm broke over Vienna - a fitting farewell for a supreme master surpassed only by Bach.