1st. Of all Beethoven’s friends and acquaintances of the other sex whose names are on record one only could have been the “Immortal Beloved” of the letter and the party to this project of marriage; 2nd, all the circumstantial evidence points to her and to her only; 3rd, long after these two points were determined, Robert Volkmann, the fine musician and composer, in conversation with the author, mentioned a local tradition at Pesth which directly names her as having been once the beloved and even (if our memory serve) the bride in spe of Beethoven. This lady was the Countess Therese von Brunswick.
The scattered notices of the Brunswicks in these volumes, if taken connectedly, may appear of deeper significance than has been suspected. They were of the earliest and warmest friends of Beethoven in Vienna; they “adored him,” said their cousin, the Countess Gallenberg; Beethoven wrote the song “Ich denke dein” in the album of the sisters and dedicated it to them when he published it in 1805; he received from Therese her portrait in oil;[126] visited the Brunswicks in the autumn of 1806 and composed the Sonata, Op. 57, which he dedicated to the brother; and immediately after his departure wrote the passionate love-letter,—to whom?—wrote to Count Franz, “Kiss your sister Therese,” and in the autumn of 1809, while on another visit to them, composed the Sonata, Op. 78, dedicated to the sister. A few months later the marriage project fell through.
Two remarks may be noted here which, if of no great importance, are worth the space they will occupy: 1st. After the appearance of the dedication of Op. 78, Therese von Brunswick’s name disappears from all papers, notes and memoranda concerning Beethoven collected by Jahn or the author; yet the friendship between him and the brother remained undisturbed. 2nd. This friendship of thirty years’ duration was broken only by death; yet, although in the later years long periods of separation were frequent, their known epistolary correspondence is comprised in some half dozen letters, and the half of these with false dates. Were these all? If not, why should all, except just these which are neither of particular interest nor importance, have been destroyed or concealed? Unless, indeed, there was a secret to be preserved. Therese von Brunswick lived to a great age, having the reputation of a noble and generous but eccentric character. In regard to Beethoven, so far as is known, she, like Shakespeare’s Cardinal, “died and made no sign.” Because she could not?[127]
(Postscript by the Editor of the English Edition.)
There are other candidates than the Countesses Guicciardi and Brunswick for the honor of having been the object of what, it must be admitted, was Beethoven’s supreme love;—or, at least, there are other women for whom writers have put in pleas. Though Dr. Kalischer professed to believe that he had effectually disposed of the Thayer hypothesis, it is significant that by far the most notable champions who fought for their respective lady-loves are those who entered the lists for the Countess Therese. I mention only the American Thayer; the Englishman Grove; the Germans La Mara, Storck, and Prelinger (like Kalischer, the editor of a collection of Beethoven’s letters); the Frenchmen Rolland and Chantavoine, both biographers of Beethoven. Schindler, Nohl and Kalischer carried the sleeve of the Countess Guicciardi; Frimmel and Volbach seemed gently inclined to Magdalena Willmann, the actress who said that Beethoven wanted to marry her but she would not have him because he was so ugly and “half crazy”; Dr. Wolfgang A. Thomas-San-Galli is the champion of Amalia Sebald as the “Immortal Beloved” and of 1812 as the year in which the love-letter was written. Of his book (“Die Unsterbliche Geliebte Beethovens, Amalia Sebald,” Halle, 1909) it may be said that its merit lies in its close, pertinent and dispassionate reasoning—the quality in which all of Dr. Kalischer’s arguments are most deficient.
Dr. Kalischer’s Defence of Schindler
Schindler’s story touching the letter and Giulietta Guicciardi was unquestioned for thirty years, when doubt was cast upon it by Thayer’s investigations, which fixed the date as 1806 and thereby eliminated the Countess as the composer’s inamorata. In Vol. II, Thayer contented himself with a demonstration that the Countess could not be the “Immortal Beloved.” In Vol. III, in the body of the book, he suggested that in “greatest probability” the lady was the Countess Therese von Brunswick. It does not appear that he ever went further than this, but he died, in 1897, in full conviction that by no possibility could the Guicciardi be rehabilitated in the place she had so long occupied in the minds of historians and romancers. His first contribution to the question (the first portion of this chapter) immediately called forth a defence of Schindler’s story, Dr. Alfred Christian Kalischer being in the van of Schindler’s defenders. Instead of traversing the evidence in the case as Thayer had done, Kalischer proposed and followed the “inductive method” thus: Beethoven could not have indulged in such transports at as late a date as 1806 or 1807. They were the outpourings of a sentimentalist, one of the Werther sort. Beethoven had said in the letter that he could only live wholly with his love or not at all—an expression not to be thought of in connection with a genius who had created the “Eroica” symphony, “Fidelio,” the Sonatas in D minor and F minor (Op. 57), the Pianoforte Concertos in C minor and G major, the Quartets, Op. 59, had finished the fourth Symphony and sketched the C minor and the “Pastoral”—could such a genius believe for a moment that he could not live without the object of his love? etc. The whole argument was merely rhetoric and psychologically speculative.
In a criticism of Thayer’s third volume, written for “Der Clavierlehrer” in 1879, Kalischer took up the subject of Therese Brunswick and, pursuing his old style of argumentation, urged that the “Immortal Beloved” was Giulietta and not Therese because, forsooth, Beethoven had dedicated the C-sharp minor Sonata to the former and nothing better than the Sonata in F-sharp major, Op. 78, composed in 1809, to the latter. Kalischer saw no force in the fact that sketches for the so-called “Moonlight” Sonata antedated the dedication by a considerable period; the essential things in his mind were the dedication and that Lenz thought highly of the C-sharp minor and little of the Fantasia for Pianoforte, Op. 77, dedicated by Beethoven “to his friend” Brunswick, and still less of the F-sharp Sonata dedicated to “another member of the house of Brunswick”; and that while Marx had described the C-sharp minor Sonata as “the low hymn of love’s renunciation” he did not consider the F-sharp major Sonata as worthy even of mention.
These essays, together with another in which Dr. Kalischer performed with great energy the work of disposing of the romantic vaporings of a writer who called herself Mariam Tenger, who had published a book (“Beethoven’s Unsterbliche Geliebte, nach persönlichen Erinnerungen”) at Bonn in 1890, in which she affected to prove what Thayer had set down as merely a probability. This writer (who had most obviously taken her cue from Thayer, though she protested that she had not read his biography when she wrote her book) professed to have had the tale from the lips of the Countess Brunswick herself, that Beethoven, while visiting at Martonvásár, the country-seat of the Brunswicks, in May, 1806, had become secretly engaged to the Countess, no one else knowing the fact except Beethoven’s friend Count Franz von Brunswick. Dr. Kalischer found little difficulty in demolishing a large portion of the fantastic fabric reared by Mariam Tenger, especially that portion which professed to rest upon the alleged testimony of a “Baron Spaun” who was plainly a creation of the romancer’s, though a veritable Spaun did figure, largely and creditably, in the life-history of Schubert. Not content with this the critic went further, and reviewing the sentimental career of Beethoven from 1806 to 1810 (in which latter year it is supposed the relations between him and the Countess Brunswick came to an end), he protested that, in 1807, Beethoven was in love with Therese Malfatti, then a girl of 14 years.