![]() To read that letter, even today, feels like an invasion of its author’s privacy: He addresses her as his “immortal beloved”. He does not name her, but the letter says she lent him that pencil. ![]() He left Prague the following day, arrived in Teplitz on July 5, and on July 6 wrote a passionate letter, in pencil, to a woman. We even have his handwritten apology, though it does not say what he was doing instead. We do know that he failed to keep a business appointment that evening. ![]() We shall probably never know what happened. One of the mysteries of Beethoven’s life is what happened in Prague on the night of July 3. On July 1, Brentano and her husband Franz, travelling to another spa, also made a stopover in the city. In June 1812, on the advice of his doctor, Beethoven took off for the Bohemian spa of Teplitz, but stopped over in Prague on the way. It is likely that they both understood that he had written it for her. When she asked for the manuscript score, he gave it to her. He played to her when she was ill, composed a piece for her little daughter to play, and wrote a song called For the Beloved. But in the autumn of 1811, just as he began work on his Seventh Symphony, he had made the acquaintance of auburn-haired Antonie Brentano, wife of a Frankfurt businessman.īrentano was staying in Vienna that year to clear her dead father’s house. His most recent infatuation, with the teenage daughter of a rich merchant, for whom he wrote the little piece now known as Für Elise, had ended in tears. Since his teenage years, according to a childhood friend, he had been “always in love”. Beethoven thought this deeply immoral he himself lived alone in Vienna, in rented rooms. Johann, the youngest, lived in Linz with a housekeeper, Therese, and her illegitimate child, fathered by another man. Karl, the next in age, had a wife whom Beethoven disliked. His deafness was worsening, he had constant gastric trouble and he did not get on with his younger brothers, his only remaining family. His personal life, however, was a lonely mess. But he decided to live for his art and went on to write an astonishing series of masterpieces: most of the works that fill concert halls today, including his Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos, Violin Concerto, Waldstein and Appassionata Piano Sonatas, Kreutzer Violin Sonata, the opera Fidelio, the Archduke Trio, and five ground-breaking string quartets. Ten years before, when he had started to lose his hearing, he had gone through an existential crisis and contemplated suicide. In July 1812, Ludwig van Beethoven was 41 years old.
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