The family of the imperial counsellor, Count Guicciardi, originally from Modena, was one of the families of the higher class with whom Beethoven had formed an intimate acquaintance through his art. Guicciardi’s wife belonged to the Hungarian family of the Brunswicks, who were likewise very friendly to Beethoven. We shall yet have something to say of the Countess Theresa Brunswick, for whom and whose sister, the charming Countess Deym, the variations for four hands on Ich denke dein, were written in 1800. Countess Giulietta was in her sixteenth year, and as good as betrothed to Count Gallenberg, a musician and composer of ballet music. He was, however, in such pecuniary straits that Beethoven had, on one occasion, to come to his assistance through a friend. The young girl did not give any serious thought to a union with the Count, although he belonged to her own social circle. The attractions of a genuine love had more charms for her. This same true, genuine love possessed Beethoven’s soul. He writes to his friend Wegeler:
“I feel that my youth is only now beginning. Was I not always a sickly man? But, for a time, my physical strength has been increasing more than ever before, and the same is true of my mental power. With every succeeding day I approach nearer to the goal which I feel, but cannot describe. Thus only can I live. No rest! I know of no repose but sleep, and it sorely pains me that I have now to allot more time to sleep than was once necessary. Let me be only half freed from my trouble and then, a perfectly mature man, I shall come to you and renew our old friendship. You must see me as happy as it is given me to be here below. You must not see me unhappy; that is more than I could bear. I shall struggle manfully with fate, and be sure, it will not overcome me entirely. O, how beautiful it would be to live life over a thousand times! But I am not made for a quiet life.”
To this, Beethoven’s elasticity of soul, which lifted him to the height of joy and of intellectual delight, we are indebted for those works of his which are models of poetic creation. What became of the traditional form of the sonata after Beethoven began to tell in song the meaning of joy and pain and of their wonderful admixture, as he did in the sonata op. 31, No. II, the first movement of which looks as if thrown off with a single stroke of the pen? There are the thoughtful questionings of fate in the opening chord; the jubilant, tempestuous enjoyment of pleasure; the expression of woe, more terrible in anticipation than realization, when misery wrings a cry of pain from him, and he breaks out in recitative—a form of art never before coupled with an instrument, but which is here more eloquent than words. Sorrow, joy and genius have now transformed the mere musician into the artist and the poet. Beethoven, as the master of the intellectual world of tones, began his career with this sonata in D minor. From this time forward, his every piece is a psychological picture of life. The form of the sonata had now fully developed the intellectual germ which in it lay. It is no longer mere form, but a finite vessel holding an infinite intellectual treasure as its contents. Even the separate parts of it, although retained as usual, are henceforth only phases and stages of the development of that intellectual treasure. They are acts of a drama played in the recesses of a human soul—in the soul of a man who is forced to taste, while still he laughs in his melancholy, the tragic contents of the cup of human life during every moment of his existence. For thus it was now with Beethoven. The deepest sorrow endows him with untrammeled serenity of mind. Darkness becomes to him the parent of a higher light. A humor that weeps through its smiles is henceforth his.
On this sonata followed a symphony with the real Beethoven flavor, the second symphony (op. 36). It had its origin in the “sublime feeling” which “animated” him in the beautiful summer days of 1802; as had also the brilliant Kreutzer Sonata (op. 47). This summer of 1802 is a memorable one in Beethoven’s life. It brought with it the severest trials of his courage as a man. These trials transformed him into a hero, and were the incentives to the composition of the Eroica. To this period belongs the so-called “Heiligenstadt Will,” which discloses to us the inmost depths of Beethoven’s soul.
His physician had ordered him in October, 1802, to the village of Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, in a condition of the utmost hopelessness. Beethoven thought that death was not far off, and, anxious to justify himself before posterity, he wrote from that place: “O, you men, who think or say that I am malignant, obstinate or misanthropic, what an injustice you do me! You know not the secret cause of what you think you see. From childhood up, my heart and mind have been bent upon the accomplishment of great deeds; I was ever moved thereto by the feeling of benevolence. To accomplish such deeds I was always disposed. But consider that for six—yes, six whole years, I have been in a most unfortunate condition—a condition which has been made worse by the stupidity of my physicians; that my hopes, from year to year, of being cured have been disappointed, and that at last there lies before me the prospect of permanent ill. Born with an active and even fiery temperament, a lover of the distractions of society, I had to live in a state of isolation from all men. How humbled I felt when a person standing near me could hear a flute that was playing in the distance, while I could hear nothing! Experiences like this brought me to the very verge of despair, and I came very near ending my own life. Art alone held me back. It seemed to me impossible that I should leave the world until I had accomplished all for which I felt myself so well fitted. O God, thou seest my heart. Thou seest that it harbors beneficence and love for human kind. O you men, when you read this, remember that you have wronged me, and let the unfortunate rejoice to find one of their number who, spite of the obstacles put in his way by nature, did all in his power to be admitted into the ranks of artists and men worthy of the name.”
And now, too, we find in his music the first traces of such appeals to the Godhead. The text of the six songs of Gellert, op. 48, which appeared in 1803, are of a religious nature. But, in the domain of religion, our artist had not yet risen to his full height. He is still preponderantly the musician of life, force and of the brilliant play of the intellect; and his compositions are still pre-eminently works of art and of the fancy. The Eroica (op. 55), which was finished in 1803, possessed these characteristics in the highest sense of the word. And now we may understand what he felt himself, as he said in his “Will,” fitted to accomplish, as well as the mysterious conversation he had in 1823, with his amanuensis, Schindler, in which he speaks of this period of his life, and of Giulietta, who had now long been the Countess Gallenberg, and who had, a short time before, returned from Naples, where her husband had acted as director of the theater for years. The conversation in question begins thus: It was held in the French language—
Beethoven—“She was mine before she was her husband’s or Italy’s, and she paid me a visit, bathed in tears; but I despised her.”
Schindler—“By Hercules!”
Beethoven—“If I had parted in that way with my strength, as well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better things?”
Beethoven had said of himself that he had something to do in the world besides marrying. His ideal was not to live in such cramped circumstances. He knew of “nobler and better things.” Yet it seems that he offered his hand to the “lovely, charming girl” in this year 1803, when he began to have a prospect of permanently bettering his condition, and that Giulietta was not disinclined to marry him. But family considerations prevented the decisive step; and she was married in the fall of the same year to Count Gallenberg. “Despising” her—whether rightly or wrongly we have no means of determining, but we do know that she was not happy—Beethoven turned to the performance of the great tasks for which he felt himself fitted.