Immortal Beloved

Josephine Brunsvik, Giulietta Guicciardi, Therese Brunsvik, Amalie Sebald, Dorothea van Ertman, Therese Malfatti, Anna Maria Erdodty, and Bettina von Arnim. Choose your honey. Could have been any one of them. 

A pianist from Vienna named Daniel Adam Maltz--my goodness, he was marvelous--entertained us, amid his evening's performance, with a quickly told love story that most anyone who's read anything about Ludwig van Beethoven, a deaf composer like no other, likely knows and certainly relishes*. It seems among Beethoven's papers, discovered after his death, was a letter addressed only to a "Unsterbliche Geliebte," which, I'm told, is blessedly high-brow German for something akin to "Immortal Beloved," a love letter deliciously composed but, maddingly recipient-less. Now to those who appreciate such mysteries, it seems that, by golly by gum, dear Ludwig had more than a few paramours. If we want to keep this darling story up and out of the mud, let it be said that a goodly number of those storied ladies' relationships may well have been, in composition, little more than platonic.

What's more, all of the above were of a societal rank higher than the young composer, which would have made marriage, for the ladies, quite unthinkable. Apparently, it's just as safe to say that not all of the paramours listed above were only platonic. A bachelor for all his years, Ludwig van apparently didn't suffer, so you needn't be sad for his alone-ness. It may be assumed that he wasn't.

Some scholars who passionately pursue such stories have settled on one of those fore-mentioned upper-class options, Josephine Brunsvick (she and her sister were his students), who, by the way, was widowed, and then suffered a second marriage that didn't turn out to be all that the relationship once promised. And there is, on record, a baby. Well, you know what some suggest: "maybe," "by chance,"  "it's altogether possible," "we can't be sure"--all of those apply. But if you line up certain dates with certain others, you could make a case. . . That sort of thing.

Now this Viennese pianist we'd come to hear simply mentioned this paramour business, an outline, however sketchy, of this "immortal beloved" story. He didn't make a night of it. Mostly what he did is offer us exquisite works by this man, Beethoven, as well as Chopin and Haydn, the kind of music only a blessed few can master. What's more, he played, that evening, on his own traveling companion, a little tiny piano (just 200 pounds, he said) that produced gorgeous and evocative notes that cast their own unique spell in haunting half-silence. What he played was a fortepiano, a word and an instrument new to me. 

Now my mother, a pianist, would scold me, I'm sure, tell me I'm spotten, an old Dutch word that signified the sin of irreverence (spotten is singing "Jesus Loves Me" with a clothespin on your nose). She'd be disgusted--I'm making fun of a man she revered. 

She's probably right. The truth is, we can be grateful to whoever he means to honor by naming her only what he does--his "Immortal Beloved"--because what we've all inherited from his passions, well-earned or well-suffered, is a gift of grace, and,well, itself "immortally beloved," that being, after all, exactly what we heard last weekend from that fascinating instrument played by a impossibly gifted pianist.

Go ahead and listen to "Moonlight Sonata" and think of a deaf man in love saying what he could to his "Immortal Beloved."

And saying that, I'm sure, would bring me back into my mother's graces.

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*I'm told--I haven't seen it--there's a film about all of this.