Some words of Dr. Wegeler in an unprinted letter to Beethoven (1825): “inasmuch as the house of my mother-in-law was more your domicile than your own, especially after you lost your noble mother,” seem to favor the usually accepted chronology: but if Beethoven was thus almost a member of the Breuning family as early as 1785 or 1786, how can the tone of the letter to Dr. Schaden be explained? Or how account for the fact, that, when he reached Bonn again and found his mother dying, and his father “in a very unfortunate state” and “compelled to sell a portion of his effects and pawn others and knew not what to do,” it was to Franz Ries he turned for aid? The good Doctor is certainly mistaken as to the time when Beethoven found Mæcenases in the Elector and Waldstein; why not equally so in relation to the Breuning family?
If, now, his own account of his intimacy with the young musician—given in the preface to the “Notizen”—be examined, it will be found to strengthen what has just been said: “Born in Bonn in 1765, I became acquainted in 1782 with the twelve years old lad, who, however, was already known as an author, and lived in most intimate association with him uninterruptedly until September, 1787” (and still he could forget that friend’s absence in Vienna only a few months before), “when, to finish my medical studies, I visited the Vienna schools and institutions. After my return in October, 1789, we continued to live together in an equally cordial association until Beethoven’s later departure for Vienna towards the close of 1792, whither I also emigrated in October, 1794.”
For more than two years, then, and just at this period, Dr. Wegeler was not in Bonn. Let still another circumstance be noted: Nothing has been discovered, either in the “Notizen” or elsewhere, which necessarily implies that Wegeler himself intimately knew the Breunings until after his return from Vienna in 1789; moreover, in those days, when the distinctions of rank were so strongly marked, it is, to say the least, exceedingly improbable, that the son of an immigrant Alsatian shoemaker should have obtained entrée upon the supposed terms of intimacy in a household in which the oldest child was some six years younger than himself, and which belonged to the highest social, if not titled rank, until he by the force of his talents, culture, and high character, had risen to its level. That, after so rising, the obscurity of his birth was forgotten and the only daughter became his wife, is alike honorable to both parties. It is unnecessary to pursue the point farther; the reader, having his attention drawn to it, will observe for himself the many less prominent, but strongly corroborating circumstances of the narrative, which confirm the chronology adopted in it. At all events it must stand until new and decisive facts against it be found.[38]
A Year of Sadness and Gloom
“My journey cost me a great deal, and I have not the smallest hope of earning anything here. Fate is not propitious to me in Bonn.” In poverty, ill, melancholy, despondent, motherless, ashamed of and depressed by his father’s ever increasing moral infirmity, the boy, prematurely old from the circumstances in which he had been placed since his eleventh year, had yet to bear another “sling and arrow of outrageous fortune.” The little sister, now a year and a half old—but here is the notice from the “Intelligenzblatt”:—“Died, November 25, Margareth, daughter of the Court Musician Johann van Beethoven, aged one year.” And so faded the last hope that the passionate tenderness of Beethoven’s nature might find scope in the purest of all relations between the sexes—that of brother and sister.
Thus, in sadness and gloom, Beethoven’s seventeenth year ended.
Chapter VII
The von Breuning Family—Beethoven Brought Under Refining Influences—Count Waldstein, His Mæcenas—The Young Musician is Forced to Become Head of the Family.
In 1527, the year in which the administration of the office of Hochmeister of the Teutonic Order was united with that of the Deutschmeister, whose residence had already been fixed at Mergentheim in 1525, this city became the principal seat of the order. From 1732 to 1761 Clemens Augustus was Hoch- und Deutschmeister of the order; according to the French edition of the Court Calendar of 1761, Christoph von Breuning was Conseiller d’État et Référendaire, having succeeded his father-in-law von Mayerhofen in the office.