In Adélaide, however, lay hidden more than the fluent outcome of his creative instinct. It remains the lovesong for all time—the last word of a noble and ennobling passion. Here—to pursue the simile of the C sharp minor quartet—a dream-image of the Allegro awakened in charming reminiscence and played sweetly and sorrowfully with itself. For this rough, rugged, eccentric, bad-tempered musician was capable of reaching the austerest heights of love—those heights where renunciation sits eternally enthroned.
Love and Beethoven seem a singularly anomalous pair: yet from his youth onward love was the very mainspring of his unsullied life. It began, rooted in filial affection for his mother, of whom he wrote those touching words, "She was such a good, loving mother to me, and my best friend. Oh, no one could be more fortunate than I, when I was able to speak that sweet name 'Mother', and it was heard—and to whom shall I ever say it now?"—And it continued as a vague but fervent longing for some sweet unknown—some "not impossible She."
"Love, and love alone, is capable of bringing lasting happiness .... O God, let me find her—her—who will strengthen me in virtue and lawfully be mine."
So he sighed: but his hopes remained unfulfilled. "His intense longing for a home and for female companionship was never satisfied," and the extraordinary number of attachments by which his career was punctuated, and which were generally for women of superior rank to his own, were every one of them destined to be transitory and destitute of result. Magdalena Willmann, Giulietta Guicciardi, Bettine Brentano, Thérèse von Brunswick, Amalie Sebald, and many another charming phantom, passed, fugitively brilliant, across his horizon: and the domestic happiness for which Beethoven never ceased to crave, was never within measurable distance of his grasp.
But now he resolutely put away Adélaide and its attendant wistful thoughts, and addressed himself to more severely intellectual work: the great B flat Sonata (Op. 106) which, like all his latter work, is orchestral in feeling and treatment.
Painting by A. C. Michael.
"The Scherzo of the 'Moonlight' Sonata, wherein a troop of glimmering fairy forms come dancing through the midnight forest."