For Elisa is not by Ludwig van

So, in the world of classical music, this has been known for a long time, but these newspapers are aimed at the general public...

In ~~this article~~, published in l’Unità online, Roberto Cotroneo informs us that, according to Italian scholar Luca Chiantore, Für Elise is not by Ludwig van, but rather a forgery created by a young German musicologist, Ludwig Nohl, who in 1865 discovered the autograph manuscript with Beethoven's notes in Munich. These are unfinished notes, not a score.

Italian scholar Luca Chiantore presented the results of a long musicological study at the University of Barcelona. This work says one thing: the most famous, the most played piano piece, "Für Elise," was not written by Beethoven. But it was a work, taken out of the great composer's drawers 40 years after his death, rewritten by a young German musicologist, Ludwig Nohl, who in 1865 discovered the autograph manuscript with Beethoven's notes in Munich. They were simply notes, not a finished piano work.

Then Cotroneo continues, saying that, deep down, he had always suspected it:

But until now, it has remained an inexplicable piece for a composer like Beethoven. Strange, full of compositional banalities, even a bit ugly in that third part of the piece, which seems to ape Beethoven without possessing either his genius or his ability. Anyone who has performed the great composer's piano sonatas is left dismayed by "Für Elise." How could a genius like Beethoven have written something like that?

Oh God, at most I thought some of the solutions were a bit banal, but I also thought that, after all, it happens to everyone. Or maybe LvB feared that the woman to whom it was dedicated (be it Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza or Elisabeth Roeckl) wouldn't appreciate such a complex elaboration, and so all the effort would be in vain...

The same news, in a more concise format, on Corriere.

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