Beethoven's Immortal Beloved: Solving the Mystery (review)

Few documents in music history have been shrouded in mystery as much as the passionate love letter that was found in a box in Beethoven's bedside table after his death on 26 March 1827. Determining the identity of the intended recipient—a woman Beethoven addresses as "meine unsterbliche Geliebte" (my immortal beloved)—has been rendered more difficult by the fact that no year or place is provided on the letters. In 1977, Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon published the most thorough study of the letters to date. Using the month and dates given by Beethoven (6 and 7 July), his knowledge of Beethoven's whereabouts during the summers of the early nineteenth century, and the testimony of a few of the composer's most intimate friends and contemporaries, Solomon concluded that the letters were written during the summer of 1812, when the composer was tending to his health in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz.

During the two hundred years that have elapsed since the letters were written, virtually all of Beethoven's closest female friends and acquaintances have been proposed as potential "Immortal Beloved" candidates, including the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi (to whom the "Moonlight Sonata" is dedicated), the Countess Therese von Brunswick (Giulietta's cousin), Antonie Brentano (dedicatee of the Diabelli Variations), Magdalene Willmann, Amalie Sebald, Anna Marie Erdo.dy, Dorothea Ertmann, Almerie Esterházy, Therese Malfatti, and the Countess Josephine von Brunswick (Therese von Brunswick's younger sister). While British musicologists have tended to follow Solomon's lead in defending the candidacy of Antonie Brentano, Beethoven scholars in the rest of the English- and German-speaking world have generally rallied around the candidacy of Josephine von Brunswick. In a book review published in 1984, Carl Dahlhaus went so far as to state that it is "now firmly established" that Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved" was Josephine von Brunswick (see his review of Beethoven und seine 'Unsterbliche Geliebte' Josephine Brunswick by Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 February 1984).

In Beethoven's Immortal Beloved: Solving the Mystery, Edward Walden argues that the mysterious woman in question is none of those listed above. He mounts a vigorous and detailed argument in support of the candidacy of Bettina von Arnim (1795-1859), Antonie Brentano's sister-in-law, a correspondent of both Goethe and Beethoven, and the half-sister of Clemens and Franz Brentano, Antonie's husband. Bettina was also the wife of Achim von Arnim, the celebrated poet and novelist who is perhaps best known for compiling the "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" collection in collaboration with Clemens Brentano. Bettina herself was a novelist of note, a minor composer, and a social activist who advanced a number of progressive causes, including the social and legal rights of Germany's women and Jewish citizens. She was in many ways a woman ahead of her time, and she was well known in contemporary creative, intellectual and political circles.

Walden is not the first to believe Bettina's assertion that she was involved in an extended correspondence of an intimate nature with Beethoven. He informs the reader that Alexander Thayer, Beethoven's first English-language biographer, considered her a trustworthy source (p. 52), and that Romain Rolland, the Nobel Prize-winning Beethoven biographer, wrote of her that "no other eye has fathomed the depth of [Beethoven's] genius so deeply" (p. 127). Yet Bettina has had even more detractors. An entry in the 1879 edition of the American Cyclopaedia provides a sample of the view that prevailed during the period following her death. It describes her three-volume Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Correspondence of Goethe with a Child [Berlin, 1835]) as a book "proved to be so full of falsifications, distortions, and affectations as to be worth little save as a record of its author's egotism and eccentricity." After Beethoven's death, Bettina published a number of letters that she had allegedly received from the composer. Since few of the original...