II. There is nothing whatever in Ries’s reminiscences, most of which are of the precise period of that affair, which, by any stretch of fancy, can be made to confirm the story; nay, more, they are utterly inconsistent with it. There is nothing even to show that he ever observed that his master’s relations to the Guicciardis were in any way remarkable; yet Beethoven’s inclination to the society of women was a point in his character that particularly impressed him. “Beethoven,” he says,
was fond of the company of women, especially if they had young and pretty faces, and generally when we passed a somewhat charming girl he would turn back and gaze at her through his glasses keenly, and laugh or grin if he noticed that I was looking at him. He was frequently in love, but generally only for a short period. Once when I twitted him concerning his conquest of a pretty woman he admitted that she had held him in the strongest bonds for the longest time, viz., fully seven months.
III. And so too with Breuning. There is no letter, or part of a letter by him (so far as made known by Wegeler), nor any tradition derived from him, that relates to this passion or its supposed consequences; and yet, it is only from one of his letters that we know of the proposal of marriage in 1810; nay, more, we shall find, in 1803, Beethoven inviting a friend to dine with “Countess Guicciardi,” at a time when he and Breuning lodged together!
IV. If the Jedlersee story be true at all in connection with this particular lady, the time must have been 1803. But it is totally inconsistent with what is known of the composer’s history during that year.
V. Brauchle was not the Countess Erdödy’s music-teacher, but the tutor of her children, in which capacity he could hardly have been employed at a time when the eldest was not six years of age! If we are correctly informed, he was not in that service until after the year 1803; nor is it known that Beethoven’s intimacy with the Countess had then been formed. In any case, the starvation story may be considered as disposed of for the present.
The force of these arguments will be incidentally but materially increased by the views—if they find favor and acceptance—advanced and supported in a short discussion of the single remaining question belonging to the Guicciardi affair, to which we now come.
It was well known to Beethoven’s friends, that he died possessed of a few bank-shares; but where the certificates were deposited neither his brother, Breuning nor Schindler knew. “B. kept his bank-shares in a secret drawer of a cabinet known only to Holz,” is one of Jahn’s notes of a conversation with Carl Holz. When Schindler read Jahn’s manuscript notices and memoranda upon Beethoven and added his comments, he remarked here:
Johann Beethoven first devoted himself to the disappearance of the shares, and not finding them he cried out: “Breuning and Schindler must find them.” Holz was asked to come, by Breuning, and requested to say if he did not know where they were concealed. He knew the secret drawer in the old cabinet in which they were kept.
In that “secret drawer” Breuning found not only the bank-certificates, but also various “letters of importance to his friend,” as Schindler describes them. One of these was a letter with two postscripts written by Beethoven on two pieces of note-paper with a lead pencil, at some watering-place not named, in the July of a year not given and to a person not indicated. It is couched in terms of enthusiastic love rarely equalled even in romance, being like a translation into words of the most tender and touching passages in his most impassioned musical compositions. This document, placed in Schindler’s possession by Breuning, is the original of what was first printed in 1840, as, “three autograph letters written by Beethoven to his Giulietta from a bathing-place in Hungary”[122] and which have so often been reprinted at various times. The letter is as follows:
Text of the Letter to the “Immortal Beloved”