The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 12

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 gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion 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 Erdody, von Brunswick, Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea Cacilia"), 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 pa.s.sages 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 Fraulein 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 pa.s.sionately 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 compa.s.sed 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'etais bien aime d'elle, et plus que jamais son epoux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la meprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as well as my life, what would have remained to me for n.o.bler 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 t.i.tanic pa.s.sion 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, G.o.d! 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. Esterhazy, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.dlike part of humanity! I weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till probably Sat.u.r.day. 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, G.o.d, 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, G.o.d! 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 impa.s.sioned 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 Therese, the Countess Therese von Brunswick. She was the cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Therese "adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother, "Kiss your sister Therese," and later he dedicated to her his sonata, Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ca va sans dire_!--" and was famed for a n.o.ble 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 Therese 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 cla.s.sics, 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 Fraulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Therese 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 Therese's diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maitre," "mon maitre cheri."

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 Therese. 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 Therese'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 Therese. As she herself told Fraulein 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 Therese 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 Therese, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told Fraulein 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 G.o.d for it."

She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and on it an inscription from Ludwig:

"L'immortelle a 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.