There was something almost diabolically sinister in the fate that placed Beethoven, so sensitive to personalities, so peculiarly in need of tranquillity for the pursuit of his ideas, in the midst of such a pack of rascally kindred. The great canker of his life was his nephew, Carl, left his ward, in 1815, by the death of his brother. A loafer in billiard-rooms, a devotee of cheap amours, a dissipated, frivolous, and wholly irreverent weakling, this young man looked upon his uncle simply as a source of florins, having apparently no respect for his age, his sufferings, or his genius. To make matters worse, Beethoven found it necessary, in order to secure the boy’s custody, to go to law against his mother, whom he picturesquely and significantly named “The Queen of the Night.” He was involved in endless lawsuits to gain the very responsibilities which proved so heavy and so fruitless. Carl rewarded all this care and love by holding clandestine meetings with his mother, by squandering his uncle’s hard-earned money, by neglecting the commissions which the composer, deaf and ill, was obliged to entrust to him; and finally, brought to the verge of despair by his own weakness, he attempted suicide, was locked up in an asylum, and was eventually packed off to the army. In all Beethoven’s struggles with his nephew he got no help from the boy’s other uncle, the “land-owner” of the anecdote, Johann van Beethoven, whom the composer bitterly called his “pseudo-brother.” This complacent apothecary saw no need of helping a brother who was one of the greatest artists living, and whose life was being slowly sapped by sordid anxieties. Doubtless Beethoven was a man difficult to help--a man of high temper, perverse whims, uncompromising speech. But the story, nevertheless, is an unpleasant one, in which young Carl and old Johann Beethoven play unenviable rôles.