Beethoven's relations with women were peculiar and characteristic, as
were all the phases of a nature singularly self-poised and robust.
Like all men of powerful imagination and keen (though perhaps not
delicate) sensibility, he was strongly attracted towards the softer
sex. But a certain austerity of morals, and that purity of feeling
which is the inseparable shadow of one's devotion to lofty aims,
always kept him within the bounds of Platonic affection. Yet there is
enough in Beethoven's letters, as scanty as their indications are in
this direction, to show what ardour and glow of feeling he possessed.
About the time that he was suffering keenly with the knowledge of his
fast-growing infirmity, he was bound by a strong tie of affection to
Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, his "immortal beloved," "his angel,"
"his all," "his life," as he called her in a variety of passionate
utterances. It was to her that he dedicated his song "Adelaida,"
which, as an expression of lofty passion, is world-famous. Beethoven
was very much dissatisfied with the work even in the glow of
composition. Before the notes were dry on the music paper, the
composer's old friend Barth was announced. "Here," said Beethoven,
putting a roll of score paper in Barth's hands, "look at that. I have
just finished it, and don't like it. There is hardly fire enough in
the stove to burn it, but I will try." Barth glanced through the
composition, then sang it, and soon grew into such enthusiasm as to
draw from Beethoven the expression, "No? then we will not burn it, old
fellow." Whether it was the reaction of disgust, which so often comes
to genius after the tension of work, or whether his ideal of its
lovely theme was so high as to make all effort seem inadequate, the
world came very near losing what it could not afford to have missed.
The charming countess, however, preferred rank, wealth, and unruffled
ease to being linked even with a great genius, if, indeed, the affair
ever looked in the direction of marriage. She married another, and
Beethoven does not seem to have been seriously disturbed. It may be
that, like Goethe, he valued the love of woman not for itself or its
direct results, but as an art-stimulus which should enrich and
fructify his own intellectual life.
We get glimpses of successors to the fair countess. The beautiful
Marie Pachler was for some time the object of his adoration. The
affair is a somewhat mysterious one, and the lady seems to have
suffered from the fire through which her powerful companion passed
unscathed. Again, quaintest and oddest of all, is the fancy kindled by
that "mysterious sprite of genius," as one of her contemporaries calls
her, Bettina Brentano, the gifted child-woman, who fascinated all who
came within her reach, from Goethe and Beethoven down to princes and
nobles. Goethe's correspondence with this strange being has embalmed
her life in classic literature.
Our composer's intercourse with women--for he was always alive to the
charms of female society--was for the most part homely and practical
in the extreme, after his deafness destroyed the zest of the more
romantic phases of the divine passion. He accepted adoration, as did
Dean Swift, as a right. He permitted his female admirers to knit him
stockings and comforters, and make him dainty puddings and other
delicacies, which he devoured with huge gusto. He condescended, in
return, to go to sleep on their sofas, after picking his teeth with
the candle-snuffers (so says scandal), while they thrummed away at his
sonatas, the artistic slaughter of which Beethoven was mercifully
unable to hear.