You are to be married, dear Bettine, or have already been, and I could not see you once more before then; may all happiness with which marriage blesses the married, flow upon you. What shall I tell you about myself? “Pity my fate,” I cry with Johanna; if I can save a few years for myself for that and all other weal and woe I shall thank Him the all-comprehending and Exalted. If you write to Goethe, hunt out all the words to express my deepest reverence and admiration for him. I am about to write to him myself concerning Egmont for which I have composed music and, indeed, purely out of love for his poems which make me happy, but who can sufficiently thank a great poet, the most precious jewel of a nation? And now no more, dear good Bettine. It was 4 o’clock before I got home this morning from a bacchanalian feast at which I had to laugh so much that I shall have to weep correspondingly to-day; boisterous joy often forces me in upon myself powerfully. As to Clemens,[80] many thanks for his kind offer. As to the cantata, the subject is not sufficiently important for us here, it is a different matter in Berlin, and as concerns affection, the sister has monopolized it so much that little will be left for the brother, does that suffice him? Now, farewell dear, dear Bettine, I kiss you upon your forehead and thus impress upon you as with a seal all my thoughts of you. Write soon, soon, often to your friend Beethoven. Beethoven lives on the Mölker Bastei in the Pascolati House. This letter invites attention to several erroneous comments which have been made on the Bettina letters and the history of the “Egmont” music. Czerny’s statement that Beethoven did not compose the music to the tragedy out of love for Goethe’s poems but would have preferred a commission for Schiller’s “Tell” is contradicted by Beethoven himself in a letter to Breitkopf and Härtel which was written six weeks before the letter to Bettina. In his book “Die Briefe Beethovens an Bettina von Arnim” (1882), Dr. Deiters expressed a doubt that Beethoven would have written in February, 1811, that he was “about to write to Goethe” about his work which was finished early in 1810; but this objection to the authenticity of the letter is removed by the fact that it was two months more before the purpose thus expressed was carried out. In the Goethe archives in Weimar there is a letter from Beethoven which was first given to the world in 1890, by Dr. Theodor Frimmel in his “Neue Beethoveniana” (p. 345). It runs as follows: [Sidenote: BEETHOVEN WRITES TO GOETHE] Vienna, April 12, 1811.