But most of all, the song is an unadorned message directly to his wife, hence its simplicity, its sparseness, the intimacy of the vocal.

He cautioned that this is “particularly challenging region of the world” to investigate in this kind of study, however, because of a relative sparseness of meteorological data and the complex climatology of the area.

He toys with sparseness, then a new pitched percussion chord leads to a subtle electric guitar declaration; it’s lightly distorted, yet not driven in an overly obvious way.

Unfortunately, the script’s sparseness too often bleeds into the dialogue which, at times, sounds remarkably wan.

Yet the sparseness of Beethoven's sketches made it impossible for symphony experts to go beyond that first movement.