When the three met - completely by chance - the seed had already been planted in the mind of former WIN television cameraman and ABC executive producer Brendan Ward.

The other two men are Gerard Willems, a self-taught pianist and keyboard academic, and maverick piano-maker Wayne Stuart.

Ward has written a book, titled The Beethoven Obsession, about the struggle, dedication and discipline that the three endured through what has been described as a crazy ultra-marathon and the most ambitious project ever in Australian classical music.

The Beethoven Obsession was also released as an e-book last month with more than 100 music files and videos - so the reader can follow the music references as they are mentioned, chapter by chapter.

Though Ward worked as a cameraman in Wollongong for three years, it is Willems who has a deeper, darker attachment to the Illawarra.

Having migrated here from the Netherlands with his family when he was 12, Willems struggled to settle into life at the Fairy Meadow Migrant Hostel, where the tin huts and public amenities were surrounded by barbed wire.

With his long hair and tight pants, Willems cut an odd figure at Wollongong High School and suffered cruel taunts from students. His resistance to conformity didn't help his cause as he refused to play sport or fit into the surfing culture. His saving grace became the family piano that his grandfather had built for his mother on her wedding day.

It was in the camp that Willems's passion for Beethoven took hold and he immersed himself in music as a way to escape his unhappiness and longing for his homeland.

He began piano lessons with Janet Mathews and borrowed recordings from the library so as to counter the cultural desert that he found in Wollongong at the time.

The family lived in the "wild" subculture of the camp for five years and became what he calls "the invisible people", unable to break free of the cycle of poverty.

"I felt my roots disappearing," he says of migrating to Australia. "My security went, my language went, everything that I knew as meaningful in life was no longer there."

Willems's father died from kidney cancer four years after the family migrated, and Willems took to selling contraband at school, including condoms and pornographic material he had acquired from the sailors passing through the camp.

He used the proceeds to travel to Sydney to hear Chopin and Beethoven recitals by international artists. He entered the Wollongong Eisteddfod in 1963 when he was 14 and won the Piano Championship Cup for three consecutive years.

What that camp stamped in Willems was a resilience and dogged determination. So decades later, when the time came to memorise and master Beethoven's many complex and varied piano sonatas, he would lock himself away for months at a time.

"Maybe if we hadn't come to Australia I might never have got involved in music, because living in a Nissan hut wasn't exactly the cultural life I was searching for," Willems says. "Ironically this nasty, restrictive life of the camp actually gave me a real need for a richness of culture."

As a child, Ward had "soaked in" his mother playing Beethoven on the piano every night, and has fond memories of the music.

"Beethoven was my mother's hero and I grew up on a diet of listening to her play his music," he says. "His message is universal and timeless. It's like any great work of art - it's uplifting, incredibly timeless and spiritual."

The former 60 Minutes cameraman, who is married to current affairs presenter Jana Wendt, had come to the tail end of his television career and embarked on an Australian Music Examinations Board diploma. Wanting to change the curriculum, so that he could perform only Beethoven in a final assessment, Ward set out to try to change the mind of Willems, who was an AMEB adviser.

Although he was unsuccessful, the pair clicked. And some time later he approached Willems to record the sonatas.

"I was going through my mother's recordings and I realised that the sonatas had never been recorded by an Australian before," says Ward. "For me it was a totally new experience. I had never produced any music in my life. I didn't realise at the start the amount of work involved and how it would snowball to become this huge project. For Gerard it was a big statement. It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there on the public record forever."

One of the sonatas, the Hammerklavier, is 50 minutes long and took Willems six months to master.

"It's not for the faint-hearted," he says. "You have to be a bit crazy to attempt it. But I have felt throughout my life an affinity with Beethoven. I'm able to communicate my own feelings through his music."

The 32 sonatas were recorded in Newcastle on three handcrafted Stuart grand pianos, each with four pedals and extra keys. The inventor was Wayne Stuart, who from an early age had started taking pianos apart to check out their "gizzards". He, too, had a crazy obsession, but his was to invent a piano that would revolutionise an industry ruled by Steinway and Yamaha.

So when Willems agreed to Ward's challenge, it came with the condition that the sonatas be recorded on Stuart's controversial Australian piano, which had been handcrafted from Huon pine.

"We used three Stuart pianos for the sonatas and you can actually hear the sound differences in them," says Willems. "They are perfect for Beethoven."

The sonatas were recorded between 1997 and 2000. And they won Willems two ARIA awards - the first for any pianist. The recordings had given the Sydney Conservatorium lecturer a name in the classical world and sold in excess of 50,000 units. Before the late 90s, only about 30 musicians worldwide had recorded the sonatas - the first in 1933. None were Australian.

In his book, Ward describes how the trio did not stop at the sonatas but decided to keep going. In 2004 they recorded Beethoven's concertos and in 2010 it was the Diabelli Variations. The madness ended in February this year, after they recorded a composition which Beethoven never intended for publication. Of the 1000 bars Beethoven sketched early in his career, a Dutch musicologist reconstructed what is known as Sonata in D (Fantasy), adding 200 bars to complete it.

With the additional works and the release of The Beethoven Obsession last month, the ABC has remastered and released the Gerard Willems recordings in chronological order on a 14-CD box set, including a DVD. For the first time, listeners can enjoy Beethoven's development from his youth to the months before his death at the age of 57.

"Beethoven wrote many works he never finished but used them as springboards for later compositions," explains Ward. "I think it's important not to ignore these early works so you can show the longer trajectory of his development."

Former High Court Judge Michael Kirby is a fan and called the project "a musical equivalent of an assault on Everest".

"You think of those who have these magnificent obsessions and how, by their discipline, their idealism, their dedication, can lift the human spirit," he says. "They can lift us all into realms of gold and in these realms of gold [is] the magnificent, immortal music of Beethoven."

For Willems, it came at a great personal cost. In 2004 his marriage broke down from the strain and tension of recording.

"It placed a lot of stress on my private life," he says. "It was time-consuming and my marriage breaking down was a by-product of that. It was a bit sad at the time."

Willems, who remarried at the beginning of this year, says he would think twice about doing it all over again, although he admits there are some sections of the sonata he may now interpret differently.

"When I listen to the sonatas there are certainly some things I would change, although I wouldn't say I'm unhappy with them," he says.

"But that's the thing of an artist. That's the nature of creativity, because creativity is so closely related to nature. Everything changes as we go through life. Music is exactly the same and that's what makes music wonderful because there's no end to the amount of insight.

"All my life I have felt connected to Beethoven. For me his music is rock-solid. It's really the salt of the earth."

As for Wayne Stuart and his revolutionary pianos, he crafted more than 50 of them before the global financial crisis stalled production at the factory.