CHAPTER VII
LOVE.
The Fourth Symphony—Julia Guicciardi—Letters to her—To Bettina Brentano—Beethoven's Attachments—Domestic Troubles—Frau Nanette Streicher—Daily Life—Composing im Freien.
"In love with an Ideal,
A creature of his own imagination,
A child of air, and echo of his heart;
And like a lily on a river floating,
She floats upon the river of his thoughts."
hence comes it that after a storm of darkness and gloom—after the disappointment of his "Leonora"—the next offspring of the poet's fancy should be a symphony (No. 4), the most delicately finished and bright in colouring which we possess?
The mystery is not easily solved. Former biographers have at once come to the conclusion that this was the period in which Beethoven's love for Julia Guicciardi, alluded to in a letter to Wegeler, had reached its climax. This hypothesis has, however, been put to flight by the discovery of Alexander Thayer that the lady was married to Count Gallenberg (afterwards the Keeper of the Archives of the Imperial Opera) in 1803—that is, three years before the composition of the work.
Is the B flat major Symphony, after all, as much the exponent of the master passion as is, in another way, the C sharp minor Sonata? Or is it, with its troubled, gloomy opening, expanding into glorious warmth and sunshine, another evidence of Beethoven's resolution to set fate at defiance, and to keep at bay the monster Grief which threatened to annihilate him? Who can tell? When the traveller, suddenly emerging from some mist-hung mountain gorge, steps out upon the rocky platform, he beholds in the distance, beneath his delighted gaze, a landscape bathed in sunshine; so to the poet's excited fancy there must have been present some bright vision, one of those "loftier spirits, who sported with him and allotted to him nobler tasks," drawing a veil over the troubled Past, and pointing him onwards to a glorious Future.
Let the Reader take which interpretation he will.
We propose briefly to present to him the two sets of letters which show us Beethoven in two different aspects as a lover—the first pur et simple, the second Platonic.