Ludwig van beethoven biography born
Ludwig van Beethoven
German composer (–)
"Beethoven" redirects here. For other uses, see Beethoven (disambiguation) and Ludwig van Beethoven (disambiguation).
"Ludwig van" redirects here. For the experimental film, see Ludwig van (film).
Ludwig van Beethoven[n 1] (baptised 17 December &#;&#; 26 March ) was a German composer and pianist.
He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until From to around , his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterised as heroic.
During this time, Beethoven began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from to , he extended his innovations in musical form and expression.
Born in Bonn, Beethoven displayed his musical talent at a young age. He was initially taught intensively by his father, Johann van Beethoven, and later by Christian Gottlob Neefe.
Under Neefe's tutelage in , he published his first work, a set of keyboard variations. He found relief from a dysfunctional home life with the family of Helene von Breuning, whose children he loved, befriended, and taught piano. At age 21, he moved to Vienna, which subsequently became his base, and studied composition with Haydn.
Beethoven then gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist, and was soon patronised by Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky for compositions, which resulted in his three Opus 1piano trios (the earliest works to which he accorded an opus number) in
Beethoven's first major orchestral work, the First Symphony, premiered in , and his first set of string quartets was published in Despite his advancing deafness during this period, he continued to conduct, premiering his Third and Fifth Symphonies in and , respectively.
His Violin Concerto appeared in His last piano concerto (No. 5, Op. 73, known as the Emperor), dedicated to his frequent patron Archduke Rudolf of Austria, premiered in , without Beethoven as soloist. He was almost completely deaf by , and he then gave up performing and appearing in public. He described his problems with health and his unfulfilled personal life in two letters, his Heiligenstadt Testament () to his brothers and his unsent love letter to an unknown "Immortal Beloved" ().
After , increasingly less socially involved as his hearing loss worsened, Beethoven composed many of his most admired works, including later symphonies, mature chamber music and the late piano sonatas.
Ludwig van beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven [n 1] (baptised 17 December – 26 March ) was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music.
His only opera, Fidelio, first performed in , was revised to its final version in He composed Missa solemnis between and and his final Symphony, No. 9, the first major example of a choral symphony, between and Written in his last years, his late string quartets, including the Grosse Fuge, of – are among his final achievements. After several months of illness, which left him bedridden, he died on 26 March at the age of
Life and career
Early life and education
Beethoven was the grandson of Ludwig van Beethoven,[n 2] a musician from the town of Mechelen in the Austrian Duchy of Brabant in what is now the Flemish region of Belgium, who moved to Bonn at the age of Ludwig was employed as a bass singer at the court of Clemens August, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, eventually rising to become, in , Kapellmeister (music director) and hence a preeminent musician in Bonn.
The portrait he commissioned of himself toward the end of his life remained displayed in his grandson's rooms as a talisman of his musical heritage. Ludwig had two sons, the younger of whom, Johann, worked as a tenor in the same musical establishment and gave keyboard and violin lessons to supplement his income.
Johann married Maria Magdalena Keverich in ; she was the daughter of Heinrich Keverich (–), who was head chef at the court of Johann IX Philipp von Walderdorff, Archbishop of Trier.
Beethoven was born of this marriage in Bonn, at what is now the Beethoven House Museum, Bonngasse There is no authentic record of the date of his birth; but the registry of his baptism, in the Catholic Parish of St. Remigius on 17 December , survives, and the custom in the region at the time was to carry out baptism within 24 hours of birth. There is a consensus (with which Beethoven himself agreed) that his birth date was 16&#;December, but no documentary proof of this.
Of the seven children born to Johann van Beethoven, only Ludwig, the second-born, and two younger brothers survived infancy.
Kaspar Anton Karl (generally known as Karl) was born on 8 April , and Nikolaus Johann, who was generally known as Johann, the youngest, was born on 2 October
Beethoven's first music teacher was his father. He later had other local teachers, including the court organist Gilles van den Eeden (d. ), Tobias Friedrich Pfeiffer, a family friend, who provided keyboard tuition, Franz Rovantini, a relative who instructed him in playing the violin and viola, and court concertmaster Franz Anton Ries, who instructed Beethoven on the violin.
His tuition began in his fifth year. The regime was harsh and intensive, often reducing him to tears. With the involvement of Pfeiffer, who was an insomniac, there were irregular late-night sessions with the young Beethoven dragged from his bed to the keyboard. Beethoven's musical talent became obvious at a young age. Aware of Leopold Mozart's successes in this area with his son Wolfgang and daughter Nannerl, Johann attempted to promote his son as a child prodigy, claiming that Beethoven was six (he was seven) on the posters for his first public performance in March
– Bonn
In or , Beethoven began his studies with his most important teacher in Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe.
Neefe taught him composition; in March , Beethoven's first published work appeared, a set of keyboard variations (WoO 63).[n 3] Beethoven soon began working with Neefe as assistant organist, at first unpaid (), and then as a paid employee () of the court chapel. His first three piano sonatas, WoO 47, sometimes known as Kurfürst (Elector) for their dedication to Elector Maximilian Friedrich, were published in In the same year, the first printed reference to Beethoven appeared in the Magazin der Musik – "Louis van Beethoven [sic]&#; a boy of 11 years and most promising talent.
He plays the piano very skilfully and with power, reads at sight very well&#; the chief piece he plays is Das wohltemperierte Klavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe puts into his hands". Maximilian Friedrich's successor as Elector of Bonn was Maximilian Franz. He gave some support to Beethoven, appointing him Court Organist and assisting financially with Beethoven's move to Vienna in
During this time, Beethoven met several people who became important in his life.
He developed a close relationship with the upper-class von Breuning family, and gave piano lessons to some of the children. The widowed Helene von Breuning became a "second mother" to Beethoven, taught him more refined manners and nurtured his passion for literature and poetry. The warmth and closeness of the von Breuning family offered the young Beethoven a retreat from his unhappy home life, dominated by his father's decline due to alcoholism.
Beethoven also met Franz Wegeler, a young medical student, who became a lifelong friend and married one of the von Breuning daughters. Another frequenter of the von Breunings was Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who became a friend and financial supporter of Beethoven during this period. In , Waldstein commissioned Beethoven's first work for the stage, the ballet Musik zu einem Ritterballett (WoO 1).
The period of to includes virtually no record of Beethoven's activity as a composer.
This may be attributed to the varied response his initial publications attracted, and also to ongoing issues in his family.
While passing through Augsburg, Beethoven visited with composer Anna von Schaden and her husband, who gave him money to return to Bonn to be with his ailing mother.[23] Beethoven's mother died in July , shortly after his return from Vienna, where he stayed for around two weeks and possibly met Mozart. In , due to his chronic alcoholism, Beethoven's father was forced to retire from the service of the Court and it was ordered that half of his father's pension be paid directly to Ludwig for support of the family.
Ludwig contributed further to the family's income by teaching (to which Wegeler said he had "an extraordinary aversion") and by playing viola in the court orchestra. This familiarised him with a variety of operas, including works by Mozart, Gluck and Paisiello. There he also befriended Anton Reicha, a composer, flutist, and violinist of about his own age who was a nephew of the court orchestra's conductor, Josef Reicha.
From to , Beethoven composed several works, none of which were published at the time; they showed a growing range and maturity.
Musicologists have identified a theme similar to those of his Third Symphony in a set of variations written in It was perhaps on Neefe's recommendation that Beethoven received his first commissions; the Literary Society in Bonn commissioned a cantata to mark the recent death of Joseph II (WoO 87), and a further cantata, to celebrate the subsequent accession of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor (WoO 88), may have been commissioned by the Elector.
These two Emperor Cantatas were not performed during Beethoven's lifetime and became lost until the s, when Johannes Brahms called them "Beethoven through and through" and of the style that marked Beethoven's music distinct from the classical tradition.
Beethoven was probably first introduced to Joseph Haydn in late , when Haydn was travelling to London and made a brief stop in Bonn around Christmastime.
In July , they met again in Bonn on Haydn's return trip from London to Vienna, when Beethoven played in the orchestra at the Redoute in Godesberg. Arrangements were likely made at that time for Beethoven to study with Haydn. Waldstein wrote to Beethoven before his departure: "You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long-frustrated wishes&#; With the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands."
– Vienna – the early years
Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna in November amid rumours of war spilling out of France.
Shortly after departing, Beethoven learned that his father had died. Over the next few years, he responded to the widespread feeling that he was a successor to the recently deceased Mozart by studying Mozart's work and writing works with a distinctly Mozartian flavour.
Beethoven did not immediately set out to establish himself as a composer but rather devoted himself to study and performance.
Working under Haydn's direction, he sought to master counterpoint. He also studied violin under Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Early in this period, he also began receiving occasional instruction from Antonio Salieri, primarily in Italian vocal composition style; this relationship persisted until at least , and possibly as late as
With Haydn's departure for England in , Beethoven was expected by the Elector to return home to Bonn.
He chose instead to remain in Vienna, continuing his instruction in counterpoint with Johann Albrechtsberger and other teachers. In any case, by this time it must have seemed clear to his employer that Bonn would fall to the French, as it did in October , effectively leaving Beethoven without a stipend or the necessity to return. But several Viennese noblemen had already recognised his ability and offered him financial support, among them Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, and Baron Gottfried van Swieten.
Assisted by his connections with Haydn and Waldstein, Beethoven began to develop a reputation as a performer and improviser in the salons of the Viennese nobility.
Ludwig van beethoven autobiography
Ludwig van Beethoven — is one of the most widely respected composers of classical music. He played a crucial role in the transition from classical to romantic music and is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. Beethoven was born 16 December in Bonn now part of Germany From an early age, Beethoven was introduced to music. His first teacher was his father who was also very strict. Beethoven was frequently beaten for his failure to practise correctly.His friend Nikolaus Simrock began publishing his compositions, starting with a set of keyboard variations on a theme of Dittersdorf (WoO 66). By , he had established a reputation in Vienna as a piano virtuoso, but he apparently withheld works from publication so that their eventual appearance would have greater impact.
In , Beethoven made his public debut in Vienna over three days, beginning with a performance of one of his own piano concertos on 29 March at the Burgtheater[n 4] and ending with a Mozart concerto on 31 March, probably the D minor concerto, for which he had written a cadenza soon after his arrival in Vienna.
By this year he had two piano concertos available for performance, one in B-flat&#;major he had begun composing before moving to Vienna and had worked on for over a decade, and one in C&#;major composed for the most part during Viewing the latter as the more substantive work, he chose to designate it his first piano concerto, publishing it in March as Opus 15, before publishing the former as Opus 19 the following December.
He wrote new cadenzas for both in [50]
Shortly after his public debut, Beethoven arranged for the publication of the first of his compositions to which he assigned an opus number, the three piano trios, Opus 1. These works were dedicated to his patron Prince Lichnowsky, and were a financial success; Beethoven's profits were nearly sufficient to cover his living expenses for a year.
In , Beethoven participated in (and won) a notorious piano 'duel' at the home of Baron Raimund Wetzlar (a former patron of Mozart) against the virtuoso Joseph Wölfl; and the next year he similarly triumphed against Daniel Steibelt at the salon of Count Moritz von Fries. Beethoven's eighth piano sonata, the Pathétique (Op.
13, published in ), is described by the musicologist Barry Cooper as "surpass[ing] any of his previous compositions, in strength of character, depth of emotion, level of originality, and ingenuity of motivic and tonal manipulation".
Between and , Beethoven composed his first six string quartets (Op. 18) (commissioned by, and dedicated to, Prince Lobkowitz), published in He also completed his Septet (Op.
20) in , a work which was extremely popular during Beethoven's lifetime.
With premieres of his First and Second Symphonies in and , Beethoven became regarded as one of the most important of a generation of young composers following Haydn and Mozart. But his melodies, musical development, use of modulation and texture, and characterisation of emotion all set him apart from his influences, and heightened the impact some of his early works made when they were first published.
For the premiere of his First Symphony, he hired the Burgtheater on 2 April , and staged an extensive programme, including works by Haydn and Mozart, as well as his Septet, the Symphony, and one of his piano concertos (the latter three works all then unpublished). The concert, which the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung called "the most interesting concert in a long time", was not without difficulties; among the criticisms was that "the players did not bother to pay any attention to the soloist".
By the end of , Beethoven and his music were already much in demand from patrons and publishers.
In May , Beethoven taught piano to the daughters of Hungarian Countess Anna Brunsvik. During this time, he fell in love with the younger daughter, Josephine. Among his other students, from to , he tutored Ferdinand Ries, who went on to become a composer and later wrote about their encounters.
The young Carl Czerny, who later became a renowned pianist and music teacher himself, studied with Beethoven from to He described his teacher in
Beethoven was dressed in a jacket of shaggy dark grey material and matching trousers, and he reminded me immediately of Campe's Robinson Crusoe, whose book I was reading just then.
His jet-black hair bristled shaggily around his head. His beard, unshaven for several days, made the lower part of his swarthy face still darker.[57]
In late , Beethoven met a young countess, Julie Guicciardi, through the Brunsvik family; he mentions his love for Julie in a November letter to a friend, but class difference prevented any consideration of pursuing it.
Wolfgang amadeus mozart biography Ludwig van Beethoven December 16, —March 26, was a German composer and musician. His work embraced a range of musical styles, from the classical to the romantic; although Beethoven composed music for a variety of settings, he is best known for his nine symphonies. His final symphony—featuring the "Ode to Joy" chorus—is one of the most famous works in Western music. Beethoven's father Johann van Beethoven sang soprano in the electoral chapel where his father was Kapellmeister chapel master. Johann eventually became proficient enough to teach violin, piano, and voice to earn a living.He dedicated his Sonata Op. 27 No. 2, now commonly known as the Moonlight Sonata, to her.
In the spring of , Beethoven completed a ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus (op. 43). The work received numerous performances in and and he rushed to publish a piano arrangement to capitalise on its early popularity. Beethoven completed his Second Symphony in , intended for performance at a concert that was cancelled.
The symphony received its premiere one year later, at a subscription concert in April at the Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven had been appointed composer in residence. In addition to the Second Symphony, the concert also featured the First Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto, and the oratorioChrist on the Mount of Olives.
Reviews of the concert were mixed, but it was a financial success; Beethoven was able to charge three times the cost of a typical concert ticket.
In , Beethoven's brother Kaspar began to assist the composer in handling his affairs, particularly his business dealings with music publishers. In addition to successfully negotiating higher payments for Beethoven's latest works, Kaspar also began selling several of Beethoven's earlier unpublished compositions and encouraged his brother (against Beethoven's preference) to make arrangements and transcriptions of his more popular works for other instruments and combinations.
Beethoven decided to accede to these requests, as he was powerless to prevent publishers from hiring others to do similar arrangements of his works.
– The "heroic" period
Deafness
Beethoven told the English pianist Charles Neate (in ) that his hearing loss began in , during a heated quarrel with a singer.
During its gradual decline, his hearing was further impeded by a severe form of tinnitus. As early as , he wrote to Wegeler and another friend, Karl Amenda, describing his symptoms and the difficulties they caused in both professional and social settings (although it is likely some of his close friends were already aware of the issues).
The cause was probably otosclerosis, possibly accompanied by degeneration of the auditory nerve.[n 5]
On his doctor's advice, Beethoven moved to the small Austrian town of Heiligenstadt, just outside Vienna, from April to October in an attempt to come to terms with his condition.
Ludwig van beethoven biography cortazar Ludwig van Beethoven was a well-known German pianist and composer who is often regarded as history's greatest musical genius. By expanding the span of the symphony, sonata quartet, and concerto, he was able to combine vocalists and instruments. He is also a pivotal character in Western music, serving as a link between the Romantic and Classical periods. Beethoven's personal life was dominated by his fight with deafness, and some of his most important pieces were composed during the last ten years of his life, when he was completely deaf. And he passed away when he was 56 years old.There he wrote the document now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers that records his thoughts of suicide due to his growing deafness and his resolution to continue living for and through his art. The letter was never sent and was discovered in his papers after his death. The letters to Wegeler and Amenda were not so despairing; in them Beethoven commented also on his ongoing professional and financial success at this period, and his determination, as he expressed it to Wegeler, to "seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely".
In , Beethoven noted on one of his musical sketches: "Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art."
Beethoven's hearing loss did not prevent him from composing music, but it made playing at concerts—an important source of income at this phase of his life—increasingly difficult. It also contributed substantially to his social withdrawal.
Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until Beethoven never became totally deaf; in his final years, he was still able to distinguish low tones and sudden loud sounds.[72]
Heroic style
Beethoven's return to Vienna from Heiligenstadt was marked by a change in musical style, and is now often designated as the start of his middle or "heroic" period, characterised by many original works composed on a grand scale.
According to Czerny, Beethoven said: "I am not satisfied with the work I have done so far. From now on I intend to take a new way." An early major work employing this new style was the Third Symphony in E-flat, Op. 55, known as the Eroica, written in – The idea of creating a symphony based on the career of Napoleon may have been suggested to Beethoven by General Bernadotte in Sympathetic to the ideal of the heroic revolutionary leader, Beethoven originally gave the symphony the title "Bonaparte", but disillusioned by Napoleon declaring himself Emperor in , he scratched Napoleon's name from the manuscript's title page, and the symphony was published in with its present title and the subtitle "to celebrate the memory of a great man".
The Eroica was longer and larger in scope than any previous symphony. When it premiered in early it received a mixed reception. Some listeners objected to its length or disliked its structure, while others viewed it as a masterpiece.
Other middle-period works extend in the same dramatic manner the musical language Beethoven had inherited.
The Rasumovsky string quartets and the Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas share the Third Symphony's heroic spirit. Other works of this period include the Fourth through Eighth Symphonies, the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, the opera Fidelio, and the Violin Concerto.[78] Beethoven was hailed in by the writer and composer E.
T. A. Hoffmann, in an influential review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, as the greatest of (what he considered) the three Romantic composers (that is, ahead of Haydn and Mozart); in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony his music, wrote Hoffmann, "sets in motion terror, fear, horror, pain, and awakens the infinite yearning that is the essence of romanticism".
During this time, Beethoven's income came from publishing his works, from performances of them, and from his patrons, for whom he gave private performances and copies of works they commissioned for an exclusive period before their publication.
Some of his early patrons, including Lobkowitz and Lichnowsky, gave him annual stipends in addition to commissioning works and purchasing published works. Perhaps his most important aristocratic patron was Archduke Rudolf of Austria, the youngest son of Emperor Leopold II, who in or began to study piano and composition with him.
They became friends, and their meetings continued until Beethoven dedicated 14 compositions to Rudolf, including such major works as the Archduke Trio Op. 97 () and Missa solemnis Op. ().
His position at the Theater an der Wien was terminated when the theatre changed management in early , and he was forced to move temporarily to the suburbs of Vienna with his friend Stephan von Breuning.
This slowed work on Leonore (his original title for his opera), his largest work to date, for a time. It was delayed again by the Austrian censor and finally premiered, under its present title of Fidelio, in November to houses that were nearly empty because of the French occupation of the city. In addition to being a financial failure, this version of Fidelio was also a critical failure, and Beethoven began revising it.
Despite this failure, Beethoven continued to attract recognition.
In the musician and publisher Muzio Clementi secured the rights to publish his works in England, and Haydn's former patron Prince Esterházy commissioned the Mass in C, Op. 86, for his wife's name-day.
Franz joseph haydn We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Ludwig van Beethoven was a German pianist and composer widely considered to be one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time. His innovative compositions combined vocals and instruments, widening the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto and quartet. He is the crucial transitional figure connecting the Classical and Romantic ages of Western music. He died at the age ofBut he could not count on such recognition alone. A colossal benefit concert he organised in December , widely advertised, included the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth (Pastoral) symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, extracts from the Mass in C, the scena and ariaAh! perfido Op. 65 and the Choral Fantasy op. There was a large audience (including Czerny and the young Ignaz Moscheles), but it was under-rehearsed, involved many stops and starts, and during the Fantasia Beethoven was noted shouting at the musicians "badly played, wrong, again!" The financial outcome is unknown.
In the autumn of , after having been rejected for a position at the Royal Theatre, Beethoven received an offer from Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte, then king of Westphalia, for a well-paid position as Kapellmeister at the court in Cassel.
To persuade him to stay in Vienna, Archduke Rudolf, Prince Kinsky and Prince Lobkowitz, after receiving representations from Beethoven's friends, pledged to pay him a pension of florins a year. In the event, Rudolf paid his share of the pension on the agreed date. Kinsky, immediately called to military duty, did not contribute and died in November after falling from his horse.
The Austrian currency destabilised and Lobkowitz went bankrupt in so that to benefit from the agreement Beethoven eventually had recourse to the law, which in brought him some recompense.
The imminence of war reaching Vienna itself was felt in early In April, Beethoven completed writing his Piano Concerto No.
5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, which the musicologist Alfred Einstein has called "the apotheosis of the military concept" in Beethoven's music. Rudolf left the capital with the Imperial family in early May, prompting Beethoven's piano sonata Les Adieux (Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a), actually titled by Beethoven in German Das Lebewohl (The Farewell), of which the final movement, Das Wiedersehen (The Return), is dated in the manuscript with the date of Rudolf's homecoming of 30 January During the French bombardment of Vienna in May, Beethoven took refuge in the cellar of his brother Kaspar's house.
The subsequent occupation of Vienna and disruptions to cultural life and to Beethoven's publishers, together with Beethoven's poor health at the end of , explain his significantly reduced output during this period, although other notable works of the year include his String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74 (The Harp) and the Piano Sonata No.
24 in F-sharp major, Op. 78, dedicated to Josephine's sister Therese Brunsvik.
Goethe
At the end of , Beethoven was commissioned to write incidental music for Goethe's play Egmont. The result (an overture, and nine additional entractes and vocal pieces, Op. 84), which appeared in , fit well with Beethoven's heroic style and he became interested in Goethe, setting three of his poems as songs (Op.
83) and learning about him from a mutual acquaintance, Bettina Brentano (who also wrote to Goethe at this time about Beethoven). Other works of this period in a similar vein were the F minor String Quartet Op. 95, to which Beethoven gave the subtitle Quartetto serioso, and the Op. 97 Piano Trio in B-flat major known, from its dedication to his patron Rudolph, as the Archduke Trio.
In the spring of , Beethoven became seriously ill, with headaches and high fever.
His doctor Johann Malfatti recommended he take a cure at the spa of Teplitz (now Teplice in the Czech Republic), where he wrote two more overtures and sets of incidental music for dramas, this time by August von Kotzebue – King Stephen Op. and The Ruins of Athens Op. Advised again to visit Teplitz in , he met there with Goethe, who wrote: "His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether wrong in holding the world to be detestable, but surely does not make it any more enjoyable&#; by his attitude." Beethoven wrote to his publishers Breitkopf and Härtel, "Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming in a poet." But following their meeting he began a setting for choir and orchestra of Goethe's Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt(Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage), Op.
, completed in After it was published in with a dedication to the poet, Beethoven wrote to him: "The admiration, the love and esteem which already in my youth I cherished for the one and only immortal Goethe have persisted."
The Immortal Beloved
While Beethoven was at Teplitz in , he wrote a ten-page love letter to his "Immortal Beloved", which he never sent to its addressee.[96] The identity of the intended recipient was long a subject of debate, although the musicologist Maynard Solomon has argued that the intended recipient was Antonie Brentano; other candidates included Julie Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti and Josephine Brunsvik.[n 6]
All of these had been regarded by Beethoven as possible soulmates during his first decade in Vienna.
Guicciardi, although she flirted with Beethoven, never had any serious interest in him and married Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg in November (Beethoven insisted to his later secretary and biographer, Anton Schindler, that Guicciardi had "sought me out, crying, but I scorned her".) Josephine had, since Beethoven's initial infatuation with her, married the elderly Count Joseph Deym, who died in Beethoven began to visit her and commenced a passionate correspondence.
Initially, he accepted that Josephine could not love him, but he continued to address himself to her even after she had moved to Budapest, finally demonstrating that he had got the message in his last letter to her of "I thank you for wishing still to appear as if I were not altogether banished from your memory". Malfatti was the niece of Beethoven's doctor, and he had proposed to her in He was 40, and she was The proposal was rejected.
She is now remembered as the possible recipient of the piano bagatelle known as Für Elise.[n 7]
Antonie (Toni) Brentano (née von Birkenstock), ten years younger than Beethoven, was the wife of Franz Brentano, the half-brother of Bettina Brentano