Back in the day composers such as Beethoven would go about their daily lives and when musical ideas would pop into their heads, they would sketch them down in a notebook for later use. Perhaps when sitting at the piano, such a composer would begin to compile some melodic ideas for a piece and write them down on staff paper. Often these "sketches" went nowhere and were abandoned. Sometimes the composer fleshed them out and added harmony, and perhaps instrumentation and published them as polished pieces. Other times bits and pieces were left behind in treasured notebooks, some of which have ended up in modern museums. Several of Beethoven's notebooks are still around (BTW this is still how a lot of composition is done although notation software has changed the game to an extent).
When Beethoven was 22 years old, he wrote his first piano sonata: Sonata Fantasia in D. Somehow it was lost and never published. Recently, it turned up in Bonn - it was somewhere between a sketch and a completed piece. Most of the thematic ideas were in place but there are parts where Beethoven hadn't yet fleshed out the left-hand accompaniment. It was reconstructed and performed a few days ago. What you heard if you watched the video above was the world premiere of Beethoven's first and last piece...According to Gramophone:
"There are a number of thematic similarities to Beethoven’s later works, however. The first part of the Sonata shares a theme with the trio of the third movement of his Symphony No 7. There are also several themes common to the Pastoral, Appassionata and Moonlight Sonatas."
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