BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
it, his success and his immortality."
So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet
in utter disregard."
Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal
epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.
A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.
Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Händel, despised the pleasures of the
table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love
the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to
have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.
Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the café where
Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
ditties. Then came Fräulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
Wertherlike fashion.
Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna,
at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."
To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the
tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
Beethoven."
There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very
ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.
An army captain cut him out with Fräulein d'Honrath; his good friend
Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schöne und hochgebildete"
Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fräulein Thérèse
von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
"volatile Thérèse who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von
Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my
dearest Thérèse; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin
Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the
well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fräulein
Roeckel.
The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdödy (_née_ Countess Niczky) is listed
among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a
friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an
apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required
bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a ménage could not last,
as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her
certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as
"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gräfin," showing that she was his dearie to
the fourth power.
Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a
twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
in 1812, Beethoven says:
"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
to Amalie a right ardent kiss--if nobody there can see."
In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
album of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie").
The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:
"Ludwig van Beethoven:
Who even if you would
Forget you never should."
In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent
passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:
"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
me of your attachment to your friend,
"BEETHOVEN."
There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion
to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.
It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the
far-away love" _[An die ferne Geliebte],_ according to Thayer; and of
her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."
Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as
ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
could never get her out of his mind.
In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.
Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Müller. And there was a poetess
who also annoyed him.
In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful
and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817--he being then
forty-seven years old--the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son
later asserted that it was only a kinship of "artistic sympathy,"--in
fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his
brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."
Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
"promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a
handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
was a cook.
Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for
female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
him longest, and most seriously of all--namely, seven whole months!"
Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions--
"_amoroso," "a malinconico_" and the like.
Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
the head of the suggester of the mischief.
Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as _"postillon
d'amour"_ by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.
Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake "der Verliebte." Other
"gewidmets" were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdödy, von Brunswick,
Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea
Cäcilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.
All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
Juan's conquests, "but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve." I find I have
catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
one). And more are to come.
And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was
never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand,
chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in
Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer
takes a middle ground,--that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.
Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
was no Fräulein Androcles to take it away.
Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
mute image of her that my fancy paints."
This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.
And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.
The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.
To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)--"_alla damigella contessa
Giulietta Guicciardi."_ It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.
It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:
"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
compassed half the world with my art--I must do it still. There exists
for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."
But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her,
more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'étais bien aimé d'elle, et plus
que jamais son époux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
méprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as
well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
things?"
Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
his "unsterbliche Geliebte." They were written in pencil, and either
were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
with a few literalising changes:
"My angel, my all, my self--only a few words to-day, and they with a
pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
grief when Necessity decides?--can our love exist without sacrifices,
and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
as I should.
"My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
wayside. Esterházy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
ever, none of these would occur to me.
"My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
rest the gods must ordain--what must and shall become of us.
"Your faithful LUDWIG."
"Monday Evening, July 6th.
"You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
post goes to K----from here.
"You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve--the
servility of man towards his fellow man--it pains me--and when I regard
myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
the greatest?--and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
at these baths, I must now go to rest." [A few words are here effaced by
Beethoven himself.] "Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?"
"Good Morning, July 7th.
"Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
Beloved!--now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
my heart--never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
contemplation of our existence. Be calm--love me--to-day--yesterday--
what longings with tears for you--you! you!--my life!--my all! Farewell!
Oh! love me well--and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.
"Ever thine.
"Ever mine.
"Ever each other's."
These impassioned letters to his "immortal beloved" were believed by
Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
life he hoped to share.
Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
been another Thérèse, the Countess Thérèse von Brunswick. She was the
cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Thérèse
"adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
"Kiss your sister Thérèse," and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
Thérèse, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ça va sans
dire_!--" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
she did not dare?
Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
more definite to Thayer's argument--if one is to believe a book I
stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Thérèse well for many
years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable
woman I have ever known."
"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
beatified spirit."
He told Fräulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Thérèse and
Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
bareheaded into the storm.
Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
"Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them,
she rushed after him--she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Thérèse's
diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maître," "mon maître chéri."
She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that
beautiful horrible Beethoven--if it were not such a come-down." She did
not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.
The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
Thérèse. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:
"I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
the flower growing by the way."
It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
Thérèse's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
snapped the bond with Thérèse. As she herself told Fräulein Tenger, "The
word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled."
Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Thérèse
had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
"immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
Thérèse, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
Fräulein Tenger:
"I have read it so often that I know it by heart--like a poem--and was
it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
loved thee,' and thank God for it."
She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
on it an inscription from Ludwig:
"L'immortelle à son Immortelle. LUIGI."
These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
that it be placed under her head in her coffin.
When Fräulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.
Thérèse von Brunswick was Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," and the
picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
when Thérèse was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
the words:
"To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from
T.B."
The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
Museum at Pesth is a bust of Thérèse in her later years, erected in her
honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.
Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Thérèse's portrait and
muttering: "Thou wast too noble--too like an angel." The baron withdrew
silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
mood. He explained: "My good angel has appeared to me."
In 1813 he wrote in his diary:
"What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!"
And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.
But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
Gleichenstein:
"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one--one who may
perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
could, I should fall in love with myself."
One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:
"Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
own."
Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:
"For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess."
To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
publication after her death, adds the words: "I will not repeat my
answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
made his life unhappy."
Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
of fate?