The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1Hughes, Rupert
History
The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1
Hughes, Rupert
Composers -- Biography
Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna,
at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."
To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the
tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
Beethoven."
There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very
ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.
An army captain cut him out with Fräulein d'Honrath; his good friend
Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schöne und hochgebildete"
Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fräulein Thérèse
von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
"volatile Thérèse who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von
Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my
dearest Thérèse; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin
Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the
well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fräulein
Roeckel.
The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdödy (_née_ Countess Niczky) is listed
among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a
friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an
apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required
bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a ménage could not last,
as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her
certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as
"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gräfin," showing that she was his dearie to
the fourth power.
Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a
twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
in 1812, Beethoven says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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