The passion for Miss d’Honrath was eclipsed by a subsequent fancy for a Fräulein von Westerhold. The Court Calendars of these years name “Hochfürstlich Münsterischer Obrist-Stallmeister, Sr. Excellenz der Hochwohlgeborne Herr Friedrich Rudolph Anton, Freyherr von Westerhold-Giesenberg, kurkölnischer und Hochstift-Münsterischer Geheimrath.” This much betitled man, according to Neefe (Spazier’s “Berlin. Mus. Zeitung”),
played the bassoon himself and maintained a fair band among his servants, particularly players of wind-instruments. He had two sons, one of whom was a master of the flute, and two daughters. The elder daughter—the younger was still a child—Maria Anna Wilhelmine, was born on July 24, 1774, married Baron Friedrich Clemens von Elverfeldt, called von Beverföde-Werries, on April 24, 1792, and died on November 3, 1852. She was an excellent pianist. In Münster, Neefe heard “the fiery Mad. von Elverfeldt play a difficult sonata by Sardi (not Sarti) with a rapidity and accuracy that were marvellous.”
It is not surprising that Beethoven’s talent should have met with recognition and appreciation in this musical family. He became the young woman’s teacher, and as the chief equerry Count Westerhold had to accompany the Elector on his visits to Münster, where, moreover, he owned a house, there is a tradition in the family that young Beethoven went with them before the young lady’s marriage in 1790. She it was with whom Beethoven was now in love. He had the disease violently, nor did he “let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,” feed upon his cheek. Forty years afterward Bernhard Romberg had anecdotes to relate of this “Werther love.”
The strong doubt that any such feeling for Eleonore von Breuning was ever cherished by Beethoven has already been expressed. The letters to her from Vienna printed by Wegeler, and other correspondence still in manuscript, confirm this doubt by their general tone; but that a really warm friendship existed between them and continued down to the close of his life, with a single interruption just before he left Bonn, of the cause of which nothing is known, so much is certain. Among the few souvenirs of youthful friendship which he preserved was the following compliment to him on his twentieth birthday, surrounded by a wreath of flowers:
ZU B’S GEBURTSTAG VON SEINER SCHÜLERIN.
Glück und langes Leben
Wünsch ich heute dir;
Aber auch daneben
Wünsch ich etwas mir!
Mir in Rücksicht deiner
Wünsch ich deine Huld,
Dir in Rücksicht meiner
Nachsicht und Geduld.
1790
Von Ihrer Freundin u. Schülerin
Lorchen von Breuning.[45]
Another was a silhouette of Fräulein von Breuning. Referring to Beethoven’s allusion to this in a letter to Wegeler (1825) the latter says: “In two evenings the silhouettes of all the members of the von Breuning family and more intimate friends of the house, were made by the painter Neesen of Bonn. In this way I came into the possession of that of Beethoven which is here printed. Beethoven was probably in his sixteenth year at the time”;—far more probably in his nineteenth, the reader will say.