One of the best-known melodies ever written is also the most mysterious.No one knows the true identity of Beethoven’s ‘immortal beloved’.But she left the composer in a creative crisis that lasted years.Beethoven’s “Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor,” better known for its dedication, “Für Elise,” or in English, “For Elise.”
It’s the identity of “Elise”, which has eluded historians for decades
.No one even knew it existed ’til 40 years after his death- when musicologist Ludwig Nohl
claimed to have found the handwritten score in a private home in Munich, and transcribed it for publication.
Almost immediately, people had questions about the newly-discovered number.
Who was “Elise?”Scholars believe “Elise” must have been pretty close to Beethoven, but no one has been able to definitively prove who she really was.
There’s no record of such a woman in Beethoven’s life.
Beethoven’s relations with women have been the subject of endless fascination to biographers.
Certainly, the composer fell deeply in love on several occasions, but he seems always to have been painfully aware,
that married life would be incompatible with his inner urge to create.
Almost invariably, he was attracted to women whose social or marital status – often both – placed them safely beyond reach.
Interest in Beethoven’s love life has focused largely on a letter he wrote in the summer of 1812, to an unidentified woman.
On July 5, after a hazardous journey by night on an unfamiliar road,
Beethoven reached the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz at four o’clock in the morning.
His doctor had advised him to take the waters there the previous summer, too, but this time he was clearly going through an acute midlife crisis.
The morning after he arrived, he began writing a passionate love letter ,
to a woman he had almost certainly met up with in Prague, on his way to Teplitz.
Addressing her as “My angel, my all, my own self”, while writing the letter with her pencil.
“Can you alter the fact,” he asked her, “that you are not entirely mine, and I am not entirely yours?
“Beethoven continued the letter that evening, and the following morning he added a further page in which
– the most famous words he ever wrote – he described her as his “Immortal Beloved”.
Who was she?And did Beethoven actually send the letter?
(It was found among his papers after his death – and considering that he moved lodgings, on average,
once a year during the last 15 years of his life, he must have attached a good deal of importance to it.)
Volumes have been written on the subject, but the identity of the immortal beloved has never been established beyond doubt.
No Beethoven scholar has, however, supported the version of events put forward by director Bernard Rose in the most recent biopic,
entitled Immortal Beloved, which had the composer feverishly anticipating a secret assignation with his sister-in-law Johanna – a woman he had always held in low esteem.
It’s true that following his brother’s death, Beethoven became the official guardian of his nephew Karl,
and that he took a paternal interest in the boy’s welfare, but only Hollywood would venture to suggest that Karl was actually his own son
– the fruit of an illicit liaison between him and Johanna.
A more plausible contender is the Hungarian aristocrat Josephine von Brunsvik, to whom Beethoven wrote a series of love letters in the early months of 1805.
She had been unhappily married to a man nearly 30 years her senior,
and was recently widowed, but she made it clear ,she wasn’t prepared to enter into a sexual relationship with the composer.
“I love you inexpressibly, and as one gentle soul loves another,” she told him.”Are you not capable of such a bond?”
She seems to have parted company with Beethoven a couple of years later.
She remarried in 1810 and there’s no reason to suppose her relationship with the composer was rekindled around the time of his 1812 stay in Teplitz.
Another candidate once popular with the biographers was Countess Giulietta Guicciardito whom the composer dedicated his
so-called Moonlight Sonata.She had become his piano pupil when she was 16, and more than half a century later she remembered him as being
“very ugly, but noble, refined in feeling and cultured”.
Beethoven was probably referring to her when he told his friend and early biographer Franz Wegeler in 1801 about
“a dear, charming girl who loves me and whom I love.For the first time, I feel that marriage could make me happy.Unfortunately,”
Beethoven added, “she is not of my class.”Beethoven later claimed that Guicciardi had loved him more than she ever did her husband, but had to concede that the latter was “more her lover than I”.
Among the other names put forward from time to time, are those of Therese Malfatti and Amalie Sebald.
At the time of her death, in 1851, Malfatti owned Beethoven’s famous piano bagatelle inscribed
“Für Elise”, and it’s possible that the Elise in question was a pet-name for Therese or Nohl j
ust mis-transcribed the maestro’s notoriously bad handwriting and that the dedication actually read: “For Therese,” after Therese Malfatti,
Beethoven seems seriously to have considered asking her to marry him, in the summer of 1810,
but his clumsy behaviour succeeded in offending the entire family, and he was barred from the house.
It’s thought, Beethoven proposed to Malfatti around 1810, and she either rejected him outright or accepted and changed her mind shortly thereafter.
“Once again,” Beethoven complained to the friend who had been asked to convey the news to him,”it is only in my own heart that I can seek comfort – there is none for me outside of it. “Another fact working in Malfatti’s favor: The original manuscript in Beethoven’s hand was found in her possessions after her death, apparently labeled “Für Therese.”
It has since gone missing, resulting in a classical music mystery for the ages.
As for Sebald, she happened to be in Teplitz at the same time as Beethoven in both 1811 and 1812.
On the earlier occasion she was in the company of the poet Christian August Tiedge, and Beethoven asked him to send Sebald “a very ardent kiss, if no one can see us”.
But innocent flirtation of that kind is a far cry from the declaration of love in the letter to the “immortal beloved”.
A more convincing solution to the mystery was proposed by Maynard Solomon, who argued the object of Beethoven’s affections could only have been Antonie Brentano
– a woman with whose family Beethoven had been on close terms in Vienna since around 1810.
For her part, Antonie venerated Beethoven, whom she described as “even greater as a man than as an artist”.
From police records (travellers at the time were required by law to register on arrival),
Solomon established that she and her husband spent the summer of 1812 in Bohemian spa towns,
though not Teplitz.Moreover, it was shortly before his trip to Teplitz that Beethoven composed a short piano trio movement for Antonie’s eldest daughter,
which he inscribed: “To my little friend Maximiliane Brentano, to encourage her in pianoforte playing.”
He even wrote in the fingerings of the piano part for her.Years later, Beethoven dedicated the first in his final group of three piano sonatas to Maximiliane, and it was only through an oversight that its two successors, Op 110 and 111, weren’t inscribed to her mother.
Beethoven made amends by dedicating his last great piano work, the Diabelli Variations, to Antonie Brentano.
The arietta of the sublime second movement of the Op 111 Sonata is rather like some transcendental premonition of Diabelli’s little waltz-tune; and when, in the last of Beethoven’s 33 variations,
that tune is transformed into a sublimated minuet, complete with delicate tracery at the top of the keyboard,
we hear a nostalgic recollection of the sonata Antonie Brentano failed so narrowly to acquire.
“Already in bed my thoughts go out to you my immortal beloved,” wrote Beethoven on the morning of July 7 1812
.”I can either live wholly with you, or not at all.”Can he really have penned a letter in such intimate terms to a married woman with five children?In the end,
much less important than the identity of the object of the composer’s love is the fact that the episode coincided with an acute creative crisis.
In the following years Beethoven’s output of new works slowed drastically, and it wasn’t until 1816 that he emerged once again into the full flood of creativity.
When he did so, he seemed to have withdrawn into his own world, his isolation exacerbated by his increasing deafness.
With his late piano sonatas and string quartets, as well as the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, he produced some of the most spiritual music ever written.
“For thee,” he wrote in his diary towards the end of that fateful year of 1812, “there is no longer any happiness except in thyself, in thy art.
“The last conteder is Elisabeth Roeckel, known to her friends as Elise, was the younger sister of Joseph Roeckel, a singer who performed in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio
.She wrote letters documenting her flirtatious relationship with the composer when she was younger, and remained close to him until his death in 1827.
Roeckel visited Beethoven just a few days before he passed away, taking a lock of his hair and accepting a gift of one of his quills.Elise—whoever she is—isn’t the only mystery woman in Beethoven’s life, though the subject of his “Immortal Beloved” letters has also been much debated over the years.
After his death in 1827, the following love letter was found amongst the personal papers of Ludwig van Beethoven,
penned by the composer over the course of two days in July of 1812 while staying in Teplice.
The letter’s unnamed recipient — Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” — remains a mystery, and continues to generate debate.
Below are images of the first and last of the letter’s ten pages. A full translated transcript follows.
Transcript
6 July, morning
My angel, my all, my own self — only a few words today, and that too with pencil (with yours) — only till tomorrow is my lodging definitely fixed. What abominable waste of time in such things — why this deep grief, where necessity speaks?
Can our love persist otherwise than through sacrifices, than by not demanding everything? Canst thou change it, that thou are not entirely mine, I not entirely thine? Oh, God, look into beautiful Nature and compose your mind to the inevitable. Love demands everything and is quite right, so it is for me with you, for you with me — only you forget so easily, that I must live for you and for me — were we quite united, you would notice this painful feeling as little as I should . . .
. . . We shall probably soon meet, even today I cannot communicate my remarks to you, which during these days I made about my life — were our hearts close together, I should probably not make any such remarks. My bosom is full, to tell you much — there are moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Brighten up — remain my true and only treasure, my all, as I to you. The rest the gods must send, what must be for us and shall.
Your faithful
Ludwig
Monday evening, 6 July
You suffer, you, my dearest creature. Just now I perceive that letters must be posted first thing early. Mondays — Thursdays — the only days, when the post goes from here to K. You suffer — oh! Where I am, you are with me, with me and you, I shall arrange that I may live with you. What a life!
So! Without you — pursued by the kindness of the people here and there, whom I mean — to desire to earn just as little as they earn — humility of man towards men — it pains me — and when I regard myself in connection with the Universe, what I am, and what he is — whom one calls the greatest — and yet — there lies herein again the godlike of man. I weep when I think you will probably only receive on Saturday the first news from me — as you too love — yet I love you stronger — but never hide yourself from me. Good night — as I am taking the waters, I must go to bed. Oh God — so near! so far! Is it not a real building of heaven, our Love — but as firm, too, as the citadel of heaven.
Good morning, on 7 July
Even in bed my ideas yearn towards you, my Immortal Beloved, here and there joyfully, then again sadly, awaiting from Fate, whether it will listen to us. I can only live, either altogether with you or not at all. Yes, I have determined to wander about for so long far away, until I can fly into your arms and call myself quite at home with you, can send my soul enveloped by yours into the realm of spirits — yes, I regret, it must be. You will get over it all the more as you know my faithfulness to you; never another one can own my heart, never — never! O God, why must one go away from what one loves so, and yet my life in W. as it is now is a miserable life. Your love made me the happiest and unhappiest at the same time. At my actual age I should need some continuity, sameness of life — can that exist under our circumstances? Angel, I just hear that the post goes out every day — and must close therefore, so that you get the L. at once. Be calm — love me — today — yesterday.
What longing in tears for you — You — my Life — my All — farewell. Oh, go on loving me — never doubt the faithfullest heart
Of your beloved
L
Ever thine.
Ever mine.
Ever ours.
