Stewart Goodyear was barely more than a toddler when he was first gripped by the music of Beethoven. A prodigy who was listening to recordings of the composer’s iconic piano sonatas at age four, he couldn’t get enough. “It was riveting. It was a religious experience,” Mr. Goodyear told a group of Princeton University music majors during a visit to their Beethoven class last month. “But I waited until I was 31 to play them. I finally understood the pain, the defiance. Beethoven is like a pain I can never exorcise when I’m sitting at the piano.”

McCarter Theatre audience members will get a chance — a big chance — to experience Mr. Goodyear’s interpretation of Beethoven’s piano sonatas when he takes on all 32 of them in a single day on Saturday, June 22. This means 103 movements and more than 10 hours of music, broken up into three parts with breaks for lunch and dinner. This “sonatathon” can be attended as a whole, or in one or two parts.

It is a mammoth undertaking that the 35-year-old pianist successfully attempted once before, in his native Toronto, last year. “I keep myself in shape physically, and I try to stay strong,” Mr. Goodyear said when asked about how he manages to pull it off. “But I think the stamina involved is all due to Beethoven’s music. The innovation of every sonata gives you the strength. It keeps you on your toes. It keeps you energetic.”

A preview of the “sonatathon” is Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m., at Princeton Public Library. Mr. Goodyear will appear with Scott Burnham, Princeton University Scheide Professor of Music, author and Beethoven scholar, to talk about the composer, with musical illustrations, as part of the McCarter Live at the Library series.

Composed between 1795 and 1822, Ludwig von Beethoven’s piano sonatas are considered to be one of the greatest bodies of music ever written. The more famous ones have nicknames like “Moonlight” and “Pathetique.” The more experimental sonatas are known by their numbers. Mr. Goodyear loves them all. And playing them in order is something he has wanted to do since he first heard them as a small child, all in one day.

“Since then, I have always felt these sonatas were a huge cycle, a retrospective of the composer’s art,” he said. “I knew when I performed them it would seem incomplete to do one, or four. Each are so different, and I felt the only way to present them was in their complete form. What makes the most famous sonatas like ‘Moonlight’ even more powerful is putting them into the context of what sonatas came first and what came later. That makes an even more powerful statement.”

With his trim, compact build and huge eyes, Mr. Goodyear is an arresting presence. During the Beethoven class at the University last month, his face spanned a range of expressions while playing excerpts of the sonatas and erupted into occasional broad smiles as he considered questions from the students. Asked about his obsession with the sonatas from such a young age, he managed to fit a brief James Brown impression into his answer, jumping up from his seat to do an imitation of the rock and roll star.

“I liked the questions they asked,” Mr. Goodyear said a few weeks later. “I was delighted by how open they were and happy that they wanted to know more about why I was doing this. It was educational for me, and illuminating.”

When McCarter’s programming director Bill Lockwood heard last year that Mr. Goodyear was going to play all of the Beethoven sonatas in one day, he headed to Toronto to attend the concert. “It was last summer, at the Royal Conservatory of Music,” Mr. Lockwood recalled. “I was skeptical. But he brought it off brilliantly and was still standing at the end. No one has ever attempted this, to my knowledge, at least not in this country. A lot of people play all the sonatas but usually in a series of concerts in a number of ways. This is quite unique.”

Mr. Lockwood knew of Mr. Goodyear, who is a graduate of both the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he lives, and New York’s Juilliard School. “He is very well regarded,” Mr. Lockwood said. “He’s not a big superstar like Lang Lang, but he has plenty of engagements all over. He has played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, and so on. I wouldn’t have broached this at all if I didn’t think he could bring it off with the kind of flair and elan and panache that he has.”

While he plays music by many composers, Mr. Goodyear considers Beethoven the one who compelled him to become a musician. “Before I heard other styles of music like rock and roll or pop, there was something about the power of Beethoven that defined my life,” he said. “It gets into the earth of emotions and it is really from the heart. It is something that just grabs the listener.”

The June 22 concert begins at 10 a.m. and concludes at 11 p.m. Tickets range from $30 for a single concert to $75 for all three. Those who attend the entire marathon get a bonus two-CD set of selected sonatas from Mr. Goodyear’s complete box set of the sonatas on the Marquis label. A special “Beethoven sonatathon” menu will be available at the theater’s lobby café.

“This is a rare event,” said Mr. Lockwood. “Playing all of the Beethoven sonatas in one day is like the Mount Everest of music, and Stewart has scaled it all the way to the top.”