Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Some of his letter is made of balanced phrases or antitheses, like a psalm: “you [are] not completely mine, I am not completely yours . . . for me with you, for you with me . . . you—you—you—my love—my all—farewell—o continue to love me.” He finishes with the incantation, like a coda, “forever yours / forever mine / forever us,” which is more music than sense.

  The letter to the Immortal Beloved is the second great tragic aria of Beethoven’s emotional life. The first was the Heiligenstadt Testament. That letter presaged defiance and an explosion of music. This second letter presaged suicidal depression and a sinking toward triviality and silence in his art.

  Who was the Immortal Beloved? In the next two hundred years of speculation, history turned up no decisive answer, only a welter of tantalizing but inconclusive facts trailing off into uncertainties buttressed by guesses and suppositions. Still, there are essentially only three candidates.

  In Beethoven’s surviving correspondence the fierce, sometimes almost incoherent passion of his letter to the Immortal Beloved, its breathless phrases joined by dashes, connects it with only one person in his past: Josephine Deym. His letters to her have the same tone and style. When he wrote the letter to the Immortal Beloved, Josephine’s two-year-old second marriage was already coming apart; the couple’s first separation came in the next year.6 But there is no evidence that Josephine was anywhere other than in Vienna at the time he wrote the letter, and no evidence of any connection either in person or in correspondence between them since their farewell letters of 1807.7

  The other candidates are the two women Beethoven met in 1810—unless he already knew Antonie Brentano from years before, through her family in Vienna. Antonie was miserable in her marriage. He was often at the Brentano house; she and Beethoven had formed a bond of mutual sympathy and affection. She was in Karlsbad when he wrote the Immortal Beloved letter to someone in that resort. Yet in contrast to Josephine’s current husband, Antonie’s husband was not cruel or indifferent; he was kind and patient with her. The trouble was that Franz Brentano was dull, always sunk in business. Antonie respected but did not love him, and she hated living in Frankfurt. But Beethoven was a man of rigid, almost puritanical ethics when it came to women and marriage—even if like most people he violated those ethics sometimes. He was friends with Franz Brentano and trusted him enough to borrow money from him and to ask his business advice. The couple had children; Antonie was pregnant for the fifth time when Beethoven wrote the Immortal Beloved letter.8 After the sad denouement with the Immortal Beloved, Beethoven actually went to stay with the Brentanos at Karlsbad and Franzenbad in August.9

  It is hard to believe that Beethoven could have thought of breaking up Antonie’s family, of taking on five children, of dealing such a blow to a man he liked and respected. Besides, if a pregnant Antonie had left her husband for Beethoven, the scandal would have been public and loud, reverberating between Vienna and Frankfurt.10 It is equally hard to imagine that Beethoven would carry on a backstairs affair with a married woman at the same time that he socialized with the couple and enjoyed their children, who brought him fruit and flowers at his lodging in Vienna.11

  The last candidate is, on the face of it, the most likely one: Bettina Brentano. She was young, fascinating, passionate, brilliant, talented, musical. She idolized Beethoven and plainly wanted to serve as his muse. It is hard to see Bettina as other than the kind of woman Beethoven had been searching for (except that Bettina conformed to no kind of woman other than herself). However, when they first met in 1810 and spent a few days closely in company, there was a barrier between them—at the time, Beethoven was courting Therese Malfatti. By the time he was disabused of that fantasy and had recovered his wits, Bettina was in the process of contemplating and finally accepting the proposal of Achim von Arnim.

  To complicate the picture, there are reports that Bettina said her marriage was made not for love but because Arnim needed an heir to inherit some property, and it flattered her that a poet of his stature wanted to have a child with her.12 (It was just before her engagement to Arnim that she paid her shattering visit to Goethe, when he suddenly began undressing her. Was this what Bettina wanted from Goethe? Now when it finally happened, she was about to be engaged. “The memory of it tears me apart,” she wrote in describing the scene.)13 Bettina had expected to be in Karlsbad and/or Teplitz around the time Beethoven wrote the Immortal Beloved letter, though her visit was delayed because she was recovering in Berlin from a nearly fatal first childbirth and accompanying depression. Still, she and Arnim went on to a long and affectionate marriage, with six more children.14

  Around this point the facts about Bettina drift into speculation. While Arnim was courting her, she and Beethoven exchanged any number of letters, of which only one of his survives (see chapter 24). In that letter, which refers to her lost letters, Beethoven does not seem crushed by the news of her marriage; his affection is strong but couched in terms more gallant than ecstatic. Bettina lived in Berlin. Could Beethoven have been courting a newly married and then pregnant woman at a distance? Could Bettina have reciprocated to the extent that she thought seriously of leaving Achim, with or without her newborn, and running off with Beethoven? Even somebody as unconventional as Bettina would have been daunted by that kind of scandal.

  In 1816, Beethoven was reported to have told his nephew’s schoolmaster that five years before he had met a woman who still obsessed him. If he meant the Immortal Beloved, and he probably did, that dating would apply to Bettina certainly, Antonie possibly, Josephine not at all.15 As far as answering to Beethoven’s statement “you are suffering,” that applies to all three women. Bettina was gravely depressed. Antonie was chronically unhappy in her marriage and had been ill for some time. Josephine’s second marriage was a disaster.

  Josephine, Antonie, Bettina—each of those women was close to Beethoven, each of them had aroused his feelings and his sympathy, each of them was musical and admired him as much as anyone on earth. He loved each of them in some fashion and degree. Yet there appear to be unanswerable reasons why each of them could not have been the Immortal Beloved. He formed a friendship with Franz and Antonie Brentano, visited the family, enjoyed the children, borrowed money from Franz and asked for advice. His later letters to Antonie are warm but have not the slightest hint of simmering pain or regret.

  As for Bettina, in the middle of her postpartum depression could she have contemplated leaving her new husband? Could Josephine Deym have been finding romantic feelings for Beethoven she never had before, making him promises during her second year of marriage, however much she regretted that marriage? Again, there is no record of Josephine being anywhere near Teplitz or Karlsbad when he wrote to the Immortal Beloved in Karlsbad.

  All of it seems unbelievable. It makes no sense that any of these women is a credible candidate for the Immortal Beloved. But life rarely makes sense. It is close to certain that one of them was indeed the woman to whom Beethoven wrote his ecstatic and anguished letter of July 1812. Whoever she was, both of them covered their tracks thoroughly. In the next two centuries no unequivocal piece of evidence turned up.

  Years later Bettina von Arnim published three letters from Beethoven: the one from 1811 that survived and the two that did not. The last nonsurviving one is full of surging feelings and virtual worship of Bettina. It ends, “God, how I love you.” If it could be authenticated (not long after it was published it was questioned, the questioning growing into a chorus of condemnation over the years), the letter would go far to suggest that Bettina was the one. But missing letters cannot be authenticated.16 Some of that letter seems more convincing, some of it less. In later years Bettina told Karl Varnhagen that Beethoven had loved and wanted to marry her. By then Varnhagen had known Bettina for a long time, and she was intimately close to his wife Rahel. Varnhagen did not remotely believe what Bettina told him about her and Beethoven.17

  Yet Bettina can no more be dismissed than Antonie and Josephine. And, though it is far less l
ikely, neither can some other unknown or unsuspected name be entirely ruled out. If the latter case was true, that woman has left no convincing traces at all. It may be that history will never know the identity of Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved of 1812, who may well have sparked the rush of work that created the joyous Seventh Symphony and the comic and nostalgic Eighth, and afterward precipitated his decline toward silence. When he wrote the letter their relationship urgently had to be decided. Was it to be joining or parting, forever or never? By the time he left Teplitz it apparently had been decided. They must part.

  There the mystery rests. What cannot be mistaken is the aftermath, the grinding depression that settled over Beethoven in the next two years. Added to his disappointment in love was a rankling loneliness. Old friends and patrons had fallen away: Prince Lobkowitz was struggling financially and not paying his part of the stipend; Prince Lichnowsky was dying; Baron Gleichenstein had angered Beethoven by declining to join him in Teplitz the previous year; in some degree he was estranged, for the moment, from his “father confessor,” Countess Erdödy, and from Stephan von Breuning, one of his oldest friends; at the end of this year the Brentanos returned to Frankfurt and Beethoven never saw Antonie again, though they corresponded a few times. He had never felt so wounded, so alone, so uncertain of his direction in life or in art.

  A week after writing his beloved, Beethoven wrote his note to Varnhagen in Prague, apologizing for missing their appointment: “There is not much to tell you about T[eplitz], for there are few people here and no distinguished ones . . . Hence I am living—alone—alone! alone!”18

  A few days later, he wrote a singular letter to a stranger. Young pianist Emilie M. had sent him an admiring letter and enclosed the gift of a wallet she had made. It seems she had declared him to be as great as or greater than the masters of the past. In those days he was not feeling so great. His warm and kindly response to this child he probably never met is a sad meditation and confession, in a tone never seen anywhere else in his correspondence:

  My reply to your letter to me is late in arriving. My excuse must be a great amount of business and persistent illness . . . Do not rob Handel, Haydn and Mozart of their laurel wreaths. They are entitled to theirs, but I am not yet entitled to one.

  Your wallet will be treasured among other tokens of a regard which several people have expressed for me, but which I am still far from deserving.

  Persevere, do not only practice your art, but endeavor also to fathom its inner meaning; it deserves this effort. For only art and science can raise men to the level of gods.

  If, my dear Emilie, you should ever desire to have anything, do not hesitate to write to me. The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits; he has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps be admiring him, he laments the fact that he has not yet reached the point whither his better genius only lights the way for him like a distant sun.

  I should probably prefer to visit you and your family than to visit many a rich person who betrays a poverty of mind. If I should ever go to H., then I will call on you and your family. I know of no other human excellences than those which entitle one to be numbered among one’s better fellow creatures. Where I find people of that type, there is my home.

  If you want to write to me, dear Emilie, just address your letter to Teplitz where I am staying for four weeks. Or you may write to Vienna. It really doesn’t matter. Look upon me as your friend and friend of your family.19

  There are things in these pages that can be taken for more than passing notions. He writes that one’s creations never come up to one’s vision of what they can be. Art has no limits, the prize is never won, what one most hopes to achieve is always over the horizon. This is a rueful wisdom that most artists arrive at sooner or later. But in no other known place did Beethoven express it, or so firmly decline a laurel wreath for his own head. In his youth he had declared himself equal to anything. Now he saw his limits, or finally admitted them. A strain of self-abnegation creeps into his letters in these days. For Emilie he includes a credo: Only art and science can raise men to the level of gods. Not prayer, not miracle, not the church. Science and art both revelation, both divine. So he had learned in Bonn, and even in his suffering he never lost that faith.

  The day after writing young Emilie, Beethoven met Goethe at last. The men had been circling one another warily at a distance for two years, since Bettina began her campaign to bring them together. But though Bettina was soon to arrive in Teplitz, she would not be permitted to join them for the great event. Recently at a picture exhibition she had gotten into a violent argument over a painting with Goethe’s wife Christiane. It ended with Christiane ripping off Bettina’s glasses and stamping on them.20 As Bettina reported the fracas, she had been “bitten by a mad blood-sausage”—a pointed reference to Frau Goethe’s weight, and the phrase got around.21 Goethe had little choice. He banished Bettina from his presence; there were no more meetings or letters between them as long as Christiane lived. Bettina’s husband Achim, finding the situation as amusing as it was sad, wrote a friend from Teplitz, “Just imagine this, Goethe and Beethoven both here, and yet my wife is not enjoying herself! The first doesn’t want to know her, and the second isn’t able to hear her. The poor devil is getting deafer and deafer, and it’s really painful to see the friendly smile he puts on it.”22 (If Bettina was the Immortal Beloved, they were meeting behind Achim’s back to end their affair.)

  In an already awkward situation, then, Goethe and Beethoven met. They spent the better part of a week together every day, walking and talking. Goethe made himself understood as best as he could. Beethoven played for the older man, asked for an opera libretto; Goethe promised one.23 Beethoven felt honored, thrilled, at the same time disappointed by their encounter. Goethe felt great admiration for this artist nearly as legendary as himself, but he was not thrilled and in fact was considerably annoyed. They parted with assurances of friendship and collaboration. Then, nothing. No libretto, no exchange of letters. They may never have met again. The titans of their time could find no common ground.

  This was not unusual, however. First meetings with Goethe often did not go well. He was firmly installed on his pedestal, he had nothing to prove to anybody, and in his work he did not need anybody. It was up to his admirers to make an impression. The first encounter between Goethe and Schiller, destined to be historic collaborators, had been an icy affair. Afterward the outraged Schiller declared that Goethe was “like a proud prude who has to be got with child so as to humiliate him before the world.” With that unpleasantness out of the way, they began to find out how much they could give each other. Still, even through the historic years of their friendship, they never used the intimate du.24

  For the rest of his life Beethoven proudly spoke of Goethe as his friend, but he was no such thing. Directly after their meeting Goethe wrote his wife, “More concentrated, more energetic and more intimate I have never yet seen an artist.” But to his musical adviser Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe wrote, “I made Beethoven’s acquaintance in Teplitz. His talent amazed me. However, unfortunately, he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong if he finds the world detestable, but he thereby does not make it more enjoyable either for himself or others. He is very much to be excused, on the other hand, and very much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which, perhaps, injures the musical part of his nature less than his social. He, by nature laconic, becomes doubly so because of this lack.”25

  What happened between them? It can be traced only in letters. The context was that when he met Goethe, Beethoven had been in an agitated state, either reeling from the blowup of the Immortal Beloved affair or anxious about its imminent outcome. But it meant a great deal to him to have Goethe’s friendship and collaboration, and he had the capacity to win over people he needed, even when he was suffering. Certainly he understood the challenge. He wrote Härtel, “If only I do not have the same exper
ience with him as others have with me!!!” He asked the publisher for a presentation copy of his Kennst du das Land? setting, adding, “and be sure to have it made on the thinnest and finest paper, for I am a poor Austrian musical bungler.” He rarely wrote self-deprecating words like that, still less like those he scratched out in his subsequent phrase: “povero musico! (yet not in the manner—of a castrato).”26 In the tumult of the Immortal Beloved, the image of himself as a castrato had entered his mind.

  It happened as he feared it would: he failed to impress Goethe, just as most people failed to impress him. The main reason appears to have been that he found Goethe’s position as a courtier and his deference to the aristocracy intolerable. Being Beethoven, he could not help saying so. But his whole approach had been on the wrong foot.

  The most famous stories about their meeting came from a letter of Bettina’s written years later. Beethoven had played piano for Goethe and felt disappointed at the old man’s moved but quiet response. To Goethe he said, “‘Once years ago I played well in Berlin and expected great applause, but the only response from this oh-so-cultured audience was to wave handkerchiefs wet with tears. That was all wasted on a rude enthusiast like me.’” Artists want applause, he told Goethe, the longer and louder, the better. As in Berlin, with you I felt as if “‘I had merely a romantic, not an artistic audience before me. But I accept it gladly from you, Goethe.’” But, Bettina reported, he did not accept it gladly. “‘You must know yourself how good it feels to be applauded by intelligent hands; if you do not recognize me and esteem me as a peer, who shall do so? By which pack of beggars shall I permit myself to be understood?’”

  “Thus did he push Goethe into a corner,” Bettina added after relating that moment. This is Bettina writing at a distance in time: whether reporting, gilding, or inventing is always the question with her. But the story rings true. Beethoven could not keep his mouth shut. And he needed Goethe more than Goethe needed him. He put his fellow titan on the spot, criticized not Goethe’s lack of response but his way of responding—like a shallow and sentimental Romantic. This sounds more like Beethoven than like Bettina, the arch-Romantic. But that is not the most famous part of her report.