Beethoven’s remarkable powers of improvising were often exhibited at the Breuning house. Wegeler has an anecdote here:
Once when Beethoven was improvising at the house of the Breunings (on which occasions he used frequently to be asked to characterize in the music some well-known person) Father Ries was urged to accompany him upon the violin. After some hesitation he consented, and this may have been the first time that two artists improvised a duo.
Beethoven had in common with all men of original and creative genius a strong repugnance to the drudgery of forcing the elements of his art into dull brains and awkward fingers; but that this repugnance was “extraordinary,” as Wegeler says, does not appear. A Frau von Bevervörde, one of his Bonn pupils, assured Schindler that she never had any complaint to make of her teacher in respect to either the regularity of his lessons or his general course of instruction. Nor is there anything now to be gathered from the traditions at Vienna which justifies the epithet. Ries’s experience is not here in point, for his relations to Beethoven were like those of little Hummel to Mozart. He received such instruction gratis as the master in leisure moments felt disposed to give. There was no pretence of systematic teaching at stated hours. The occasional neglect of a lesson at Baron Westphal’s, as detailed in the anecdote above given, may be explained on other ground than that of extraordinary repugnance to teaching. Beethoven was, in 1791-’92, just at the age when the desire for distinction was fresh and strong; he was conscious of powers still not fully developed; his path was diverse from that of the other young men with whom he associated and who, from all that can be gathered now on the subject, had little faith in that which he had chosen. He must have felt the necessity of other instruction, or, at all events, of better opportunities to compare his powers with those of others, to measure himself by a higher standard, to try the effect of his compositions in another sphere, to satisfy himself that his instincts as a composer were true and that his deviations from the beaten track were not wild and capricious. Waldstein, we know from Wegeler (and this is confirmed by his own words), had faith in him and his works, and it will be seen that another, Fischenich, had also. But what would be said of him and his compositions in the city of Mozart, Haydn, Gluck? To this add the restlessness of an ambitious youth to whom the routine of duties, which must long since in great measure have lost the charm of novelty, had become tedious, and the natural longing of young men for the great world, for a wider field of action, had grown almost insupportable.
Beethoven’s Sweethearts in Bonn
Or Beethoven’s raptus may just then have had a very different origin; Jeannette d’Honrath, or Fräulein Westerhold, was perhaps the innocent cause—two young ladies whose names are preserved by Wegeler of the many for whom he says his friend at various times indulged transient, but not the less ardent, passions. The former was from Cologne, whence she occasionally came to Bonn to pass a few weeks with Eleonore von Breuning.
“She was a beautiful, vivacious blond, of good education,” says Wegeler, “and amiable disposition, who enjoyed music greatly and possessed an agreeable voice; wherefore she several times teased our friend by singing a song, familiar at the time, beginning:
‘Mich heute noch von dir zu trennen
Und dieses nicht verhindern können,
Ist zu empfindlich für mein Herz!’
for the favored rival was the Austrian recruiting officer in Cologne, Carl Greth, who married the young lady and died on October 15, 1827, as Field Marshal General, Commander of the 23rd Regiment of Infantry and Commandant at Temesvar.”[44]