Chapter 5
“Beethoven,” his student Ferdinand Ries recalled, “was frequently in love, but usually only for a very short time.” He appreciated the female form, “especially beautiful, youthful faces.” But he never married, and therein lies the tale.
A longing for marriage is a theme that runs throughout his correspondence, at least in earlier years. He proposed or at least seriously considered proposing, in 1810, to Therese Malfatti, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Viennese banker. Beethoven was close to the family for a time, but for reasons that remain unclear, he was abruptly forbidden access to the household other than for musical occasions. Perhaps Therese’s father—or Therese herself—wanted to make it clear that a personal relationship between the two of them had no future.
The composer’s most intense love interest, however, was an unidentified woman whose existence is known only through a lengthy three-part letter Beethoven sent her in July 1812. Toward the end of it he calls her “my immortal beloved,” and the name, with added uppercase letters, has stuck. The identity of the Immortal Beloved has occupied critics, scholars, and amateur sleuths ever since. Each writer invariably declares the mystery solved beyond all doubt. Just as invariably, another writer reaches a different conclusion with equal conviction.
Among the many candidates proposed over the years are Countess Julie (Giulietta) Guicciardi, Countess Therese Brunsvick, Countess Josephine Brunsvick (her sister), Countess Anna Maria Erdödy, Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, Countess Almerie Esterházy, and Antonie Brentano, née von Birkenstock. (Quite aside from issues of chronology, the idea of the composer’s sister-in-law Johanna van Beethoven as the title character of the 1994 film Immortal Beloved cannot be taken seriously.) That so many names have been put forward—even this list is selective—gives credence to Ries’s recollection that the composer “was frequently in love, but usually only for a very short time”—and, it might be added, with women for whom there was little chance of marriage or a long-term relationship because they were of noble birth, already married, or both. Armchair psychiatrists have had a field day with this, and they have a point, for in a roundabout way, Beethoven’s attraction to women who were socially unattainable ensured that a personal attachment to another individual would not in the end conflict with his overriding commitment to his art.
Based on the documentation that has come to light over the years, the two most plausible candidates are Antonie Brentano and Josephine von Brunsvick-Deym-Stackelberg. Whatever the merits of each, the history of the letter and the search for the identity of the Immortal Beloved have much to tell us about Beethoven’s side of the affair and about listeners’ responses to some of his most famous works.
How did Beethoven come to have this letter—addressed to someone else—in his own possession? It was discovered in a secret compartment of his writing desk after his death, along with the Heiligenstadt Testament. He wanted to keep it, and he wanted it kept a secret, at least as long as he was alive. Either he never sent the letter, or the woman to whom it was addressed returned it to him because she could not risk having it found in her possession. The latter seems the more likely explanation.
The very year in which the letter was written was long a matter of dispute, though scholars now mostly agree that it was written over July 6 and 7, 1812, when the composer was in Bad Teplitz, a Bohemian spa town (now Teplice, in the Czech Republic). The woman’s identity revolves around such circumstantial bits of evidence as coach schedules, mail deliveries, and police records that document the arrival and departure dates of visitors to Bad Teplitz and nearby Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) around that time. The best evidence suggests that Beethoven and the Immortal Beloved had shared a passionate encounter in Prague in early July. Beethoven proceeded from there to Bad Teplitz on July 4, and she departed around the same time for Karlsbad.
Having arrived in Teplitz late the night before, Beethoven began his letter with the words: “My angel, my all, my own self.—Only a few words today, and in pencil (namely yours).…Love demands everything, and rightly so, and thus it is for me with you and for you with me.” He then related the details of his harrowing two-day, mud-filled journey from Prague. He resumed his letter later that evening, having learned that the mail coach to Karlsbad left only on Monday and Thursday mornings, which meant that it would be several days yet before his Beloved will hear from him. “You are suffering, my dearest creature.…Ah, wherever I am, you are also with me, and we speak with each other. I shall arrange it that I can live with you. What a life!!!! thus!!!…As much as you love me I love you still more….” And the next morning, he wrote in conclusion:
Already while still in bed my thoughts rush to you, my Immortal Beloved, at times joyfully but then sorrowfully, waiting to learn if Fate has heard us. I can live either wholly with you or not at all. Yes, I have resolved to wander in faraway places until I can fly into your arms and call myself entirely at home with you and can send my soul, enwrapped by you, into the realm of spirits.…No other woman than you can possess my heart, none—none. O God, why must one be so separated from what one loves so much? And yet my life in Vienna is a miserable life. Your love makes me at once the happiest and unhappiest of men.…Be calm. Only through calm contemplation of our existence can we achieve our goal of living together. Be calm—love me—today—yesterday—what tearful longing for you—for you—for you—my life—my all—farewell—oh continue to love me—never underestimate the truest heart of your Beloved.
L.
Ever yours
Ever mine
Ever ours
Whatever the identity of the “Immortal Beloved,” Beethoven’s relationship with her shook him to the core. Their affair ended at some point in the second half of 1812, almost certainly broken off by the woman in question. And it was toward the end of that year that the composer began keeping his diary, a document whose first entry concludes with these words: “O God! Give me strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life. In this manner with A everything goes to ruin.”
“A” may have been Antonie Brentano, but we know the composer’s diary only through transcriptions made by others, and “A” could well be a copyist’s misreading of “St,” which in turn would point to Josephine von Brunsvick-Deym-Stackelberg. In any case, the end of the affair—and the apparent impossibility of its resumption—made it clear to Beethoven once and for all that domestic bliss was not in his future. If the Heiligenstadt Testament reflects the self-realization that resignation was the only way to deal with his growing deafness, then the diary reflects his resignation to the reality of spending the rest of his life alone. The very fact that he should feel compelled to begin keeping a journal of his private thoughts points to a resolution to open a new chapter in his life and to mark the occasion with a new kind of sketchbook, one that would record his ideas about the conduct of his life in ways both large and small, personal and professional. It is well worth remembering that the diary’s second entry addresses technical questions of voice-leading in music. Composition was rarely far from his mind.
How did this affair manifest itself in his music? Anton Schindler, who in 1840 was the first to publish the letter to the Immortal Beloved, maintained that Beethoven possessed the “true soul of an artist” and that this soul manifested itself “to varying degrees in every one of his works.” To Schindler’s mind, Beethoven’s one great love was Giulietta Guicciardi, and the “Moonlight” Sonata of 1802 (Sonata quasi una fantasia, op. 27, no. 2) was the composer’s musical love letter to her. “What genius,” Schindler asked, “could have written the Fantasia in C-sharp minor without such a love? And let it be said here, if only in passing: it was his love for Giulietta, the dedicatee of this work, that inspired him to create it.” But Schindler had misdated the letter to the Immortal Beloved, and his hypothesis is now largely rejected. This did not, however, prevent his report from setting in motion a tradition of critical commentary that links this sonata with erotic love. The languorous, plangent first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, according to this tradition, embodies longing, its violent finale a renunciation of that longing.
A more plausible candidate for a veiled message to the Immortal Beloved is the 1816 song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, op. 98 (“To the Distant Beloved”). It was composed in the same year, after all, that the composer had written to Ries: “Best greetings to your wife. Unfortunately, I have none, I found only one, whom I shall certainly never possess. I am nevertheless no misogynist.” The Immortal Beloved was still clearly on his mind some four years after the end of the affair, and this is indeed an unusual work, the most innovative of all his compositions for voice and piano. It is not merely a collection of songs but the first true song cycle, in which the individual numbers move through a quasi-narrative sequence and even share musical motifs in subtle ways. What makes the set even more unusual is that Beethoven directs the six songs to be performed continuously, without a pause between them. (He would later use this same strategy in the seven-movement String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131.)
4. The title page of An die ferne Geliebte (“To the Distant Beloved”), op. 98 (Vienna: S. A. Steiner, 1816). Long thought to be associated with the “Immortal Beloved,” this song cycle was in fact a memorial to the late wife of the dedicatee, Prince Lobkowitz.
New research has shown that the song cycle’s beloved is distant because she is deceased. It now seems clear that the cycle was commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz as a memorial to his late wife, Maria Karoline. In the opening song, the “hill” on which the singer tells us he is sitting is a metaphor for a grave, and the title page indeed shows a male lutenist singing to a distant female figure high up in the clouds. The motivation behind the commission does not in any way preclude the idea that Beethoven thought of his own Immortal Beloved in composing this work. Compositional treatises had long emphasized that in order to project an emotion, a composer must have had some personal experience of it, and Beethoven’s music is undoubtedly the richer for the intensity of the affair. Yet we should remain wary of assertions that insist on drawing direct lines between any of his various relationships and specific works of music. In this sense, the affair with the Immortal Beloved was an important event that shaped his larger vision of life, which in turn contributed to the more specific vision of his art.