When Was the Love-Letter Written?
The document presents three incomplete dates, the year being omitted in each:
“July 6, in the morning.”
“Evening, Monday, July 6.”
“Good-morning on July 7.”
A reference to the almanacs of 1795, 1801, 1807, and 1812, shows that July 6th fell upon a Monday in those years. The year 1795 is of course excluded, for Julia Guicciardi had not then completed her eleventh year, and we turn at once to 1801. The main subjects of Beethoven’s letter to Wegeler of June 29th were his ailments and the modes of treatment adopted by his medical advisers; to which he adds his desire for his friend’s counsel, Wegeler being a physician of eminent ability and skill. It was Wegeler’s reply which drew forth the second letter of November 16, only four and a half months after the first, which continues the subject with equal minuteness of detail. If now the reader will turn back and carefully reperuse the two, he will see that all possibility of a journey to some distant watering-place, requiring the use of four post-horses, whether in Hungary or elsewhere, in the interval between those letters is absolutely excluded by their contents. The conclusion is unavoidable that the diary was not written in 1801.
But may there not be an error either in the day of the month or of the week in the words: “Evening, Monday, July 6?” If there be, the inquiry is extended to the years 1800 and 1802.
On July 6th, 1800, the Guicciardi family had hardly reached Vienna from Trieste. But suppose Julia had been previously sent thither to complete her education, and thus had become known to Beethoven. In that case, what is to be thought of guardians and friends who could allow her such liberty, or rather license, that she, at the age of fifteen and three-quarter years, should already have formed the relations necessarily implied by the language of the diary with a man twice her age? What, too, must be thought of Beethoven! Granting him to have been, as Magdalena Willmann and others said, “half crazy,” the man certainly was not a fool!
The year 1800 may also be safely discarded. As to 1802, it is superfluous to say more than that in the next chapter will be found part of a letter by Beethoven, dated “Vienna, July 13, 1802.” His stay at the bath must, indeed, have been short if he reached it with four post-horses on the 5th and is in Vienna again writing letters on the 13th!
In 1803, July 6th fell upon Wednesday. But there was no such error in the date; Beethoven gives the day of the month three times in twenty-four hours—twice on the 6th, once on the 7th. A mistake here is inconceivable. The day of the week, indeed, is written but once; but then it is Monday, and Sunday and Monday are precisely the two days of the week which one most rarely or never mistakes. But that part of the document which bears the date “Evening, Monday, July 6” contains certain words that are decisive. This part is a postscript to the writing of the morning and is written, he says, because he was too late for the post on that day, and “Mondays, Thursdays, the only days on which the mail-coach goes from here to K.” The conclusion is irresistible: Schindler and his copyists are all wrong; the document was not written in the years 1800-1803; the “Immortal Beloved” for whom it was written was not the Countess Julia Guicciardi. Therefore, they who have wept in sympathy over this Werther’s sufferings caused by this Charlotte, may dry their tears. They can comfort themselves with the assurance, that the catastrophe was by no means so disastrous as represented. The affair was but an episode; not the grand tragedy of Beethoven’s life. But, being a love adventure, it has been treated with fact in ratio to fancy like Falstaff’s bread to his sack. One author in particular, who accepts all Schindler’s assumptions and conjectures without question or suspicion, has elaborated the topic at great length, though perhaps (to borrow Sheridan’s jest) less luminously than voluminously. Having wrought up the feelings of “his lovely readers, his dear lady friends of Beethoven,” to the highest pitch possible in a tragedy where the hero, after the catastrophe, still lives and prospers, he consoles them a few chapters farther on by giving to Beethoven for his one “Love’s Labor Lost” two new ones gained—the one, a married woman, the other, a young girl of fourteen years; and, moreover—if, in the confusion of his dates, the reader is not greatly misled—both at the same time! “Also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before,” saith the ancient Hebrew poet.[123]
Even if one were disposed to attach no great importance to the arguments thus far advanced, there are two passages in the letter which could not have been written in that brilliant period of Beethoven’s life (1800-1802) and therefore are conclusive; viz.: “My life in W (Wien = Vienna) is now a wretched life,” and “At my age I need a quiet, steady life.” In fact, the severest critical discussion of my argument against the accuracy of Schindler’s statement has failed to find a flaw in it beyond the unessential assertion that Beethoven could scarcely be conceived as having erred in the matter of the day of the week. Since then the author has himself accidentally learned by experience how a mistake of this kind, made in the morning, can easily be perpetuated in private letters; he learned it by being compelled to prove the absolute accuracy of an official document.
Every attentive and thoughtful reader of the letter must realize that it is irreconcilable with the notion that Beethoven’s passionate devotion to the lady was a new and sudden one; also that Beethoven had parted with his beloved, whoever she may have been, only a short time before; that he writes in the full conviction that his love is returned and the desire for a union of their fates was mutual, and that by patient waiting the obstacles then in the way of their purpose to live together would be overcome.