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 toward 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 ardor 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
Earth'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.