It has often been asserted that the best numbers in "Fidelio" were directly inspired in Beethoven by the emotional exaltation resulting from one of his unhappy love affairs. Mr. Thayer doubts this story, because he could not find anything in Beethoven's sketch-books corroborating it; but even if it should be a myth, there are many well authenticated facts which show that Beethoven, like other composers, owed many of his best ideas to the magic influence of love in stimulating his mental powers. He dedicated thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six different women, and it is well known that he was constantly falling in love, had made up his mind several times to marry, and was twice refused. Female beauty always made a deep impression on him, and Marx relates that "even in his later years he was fond of looking at pretty faces, and used to stand still in the street and gaze after them with his eyeglasses till they were out of sight; if anyone noticed this he smiled and looked confused, but not annoyed. His little Werther romance he had lived at an early age in Bonn. In Vienna, he is said to have had more than one love affair and to have made an occasional conquest which would have been difficult if not impossible to many an Adonis." Weber's "Freischuetz" doubtless owes much of its beauty to the fact that it was written but a few months before the composer's marriage. In one of his letters to his betrothed he writes, "Yesterday I composed all the forenoon and thought of you _very often_, for I was at work on a scene of _Agatha_, in which I still cannot attain all the fire, longing, and passion that vaguely float before me." And his son testifies that Weber's love influenced all his work at the time. "It was the reason," he says, "that Weber took to heart, above everything else, the part of _Aennchen_, in which he saw an embodiment of his bride's special talent and characteristics, and it was under the fostering stimulus of this warm feeling that he allowed those parts of the opera in which _Aennchen_ appears to ripen first. The first note which he wrote down for the 'Freischuetz' belongs in the duo between _Aennchen_ and _Agatha_." He adds that his father, while composing, actually saw his bride in his mind's eye, and heard her sing his melodies, and accordingly as this imaginary vocalist nodded approval or shook her head, he was led to retain or reject certain musical ideas.