The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume IIThayer, Alexander Wheelock
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The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume II
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827
Your report plunged me from the regions of happiness into the
depths. Why the adjunction, You would let me know when there would
be another musicale, am I nothing more than your musician or
that of the others?--that at least is the interpretation, I can
therefore seek support only in my own breast, there is none for me
outside of it; no, nothing but wounds has friendship and kindred
feelings for me. So be it then, for you, poor B. there is no
happiness in the outer world, you must create it in yourself, only
in the world of ideality will you find friends.
I beg of you to set my mind at rest as to whether I was guilty of
any impropriety yesterday, or if you cannot do that then tell me
the truth, I hear it as willingly as I speak it--there is still
time, the truth may yet help me. Farewell--don’t let your only
friend Dorner know anything of this.
The letter to Therese reads:
With this you are receiving, honored Therese, what I promised,
and if there were not the best of reasons against it, you would
receive more in order to show that I always do more for my friends
than I promise--I hope and have no doubt that you keep yourself
as well occupied as pleasantly entertained--but not so much that
you cannot also think of me. It would perhaps be presuming upon
your kindness or placing too high a value upon myself if I were to
write you: “people are only together when they are in each other’s
company, even the distant one, the absent one lives for us,” who
would dare to write such a sentiment to the volatile T. who handles
everything in this world so lightly? Do not forget, in laying out
your occupation, the pianoforte, or music generally; you have so
beautiful a talent for it, why not cultivate it exclusively, you
who have so much feeling for everything that is beautiful and good,
why will you not make use of it in order to learn the more perfect
things in so beautiful an art, which always reflects its light
upon us--I live very solitarily and quietly, although now and then
lights try to arouse me there is still for me a void which cannot
be filled since you are all gone and which defies even my art which
has always been so faithful to me--your pianoforte is ordered and
you will have it soon--explain for yourself the difference between
the treatment of a theme which I invented one evening and the
manner in which I finally wrote it down, but don’t get the punch
to help you--how lucky you were to be able to go to the country so
soon, I shall not have this pleasure until the 8th, I rejoice in
the prospect like a child, how joyous I am when I can walk amongst
bushes and trees, herbs, rocks, nobody can love the country as I
do--since woods, trees, rocks, return the answer which man wants to
hear.
(Four lines stricken out).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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