Antonie Brentano
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Antonie von Birkenstock Brentano, (Vienna, April 28, 1780 – April 12, 1869, Frankfurt am Main) is notable as being one of the likelier of the many possible candidates put forward by scholars as composer Ludwig van Beethoven's Unsterbliche Geliebte, or "Immortal Beloved". Beethoven dedicated the Diabelli Variations Op. 120 to her, and his piano sonata Op. 90 to Maximiliane, her daughter.
Good morning, on July 7
Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits - Yes, unhappily it must be so - You will be the more contained since you know my fidelity to you. No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never - Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in V is now a wretched life - Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men - At my age I need a steady, quiet life - can that be so in our connection? My angel, I have just been told that the mailcoach goes every day - therefore I must close at once so that you may receive the letter at once - Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together - Be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - you - you - my life - my all - farewell. Oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.
ever thine
ever mine
ever ours
Beethoven's Immortal Beloved?
The sole documentary evidence for the "Immortal Beloved" is a soul-searching and impassioned letter Beethoven wrote over a period of three days from the Bohemian spa of Teplitz (probably dateable to July 1812, though the year is not given) addressed to an unnamed woman with whom the week before he had had a meeting in Prague or Vienna, and with whom in the letter he is making plans to meet in a place with initial "K", which most writers, following Maynard Solomon, have assumed to be Karlsbad. The wording of the letter suggests an existing loving relationship of long standing. In its pages, Beethoven broaches and discusses the possibility for, and impediments to, marriage:
Good morning, on July 7 Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits - Yes, unhappily it must be so - You will be the more contained since you know my fidelity to you. No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never - Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in V is now a wretched life - Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men - At my age I need a steady, quiet life - can that be so in our connection?.. (excerpt)
Upon Beethoven's death in 1827, the letter was found among his private papers, strongly suggesting either that it was never sent or that it was returned to him subsequently by the addressee. The currently fading academic favour for Antonie Brentano as the putative recipient may be attributed to the arguments adduced in an influential book by the Beethoven scholar, Maynard Solomon.
Solomon writes:
She must be a woman well known to Beethoven in Vienna; she must have been in Prague in the first week of July 1812; and she must have been in the Bohemian spa town of Karlsbad in the weeks following.
It should be borne in mind that Beethoven never refers to Karlsbad in the letter by name, instead using the initial "K", which one researcher has erroneously suggested might refer instead to Klosterneuburg, supposedly "the nearest post-stop to Countess Anna-Marie Erdödy's estate at Jedlersee". This hypothesis however is absolutely unfounded, because since Klosterneuburg could only be reached from Jedlesee via Vienna and Kahlenbergerdorf (there was no bridge across the Danube between Korneuburg and Klosterneuburg), the next post-stop to Jedlesee was of course the so-called "Hauptmaut" in Leopoldstadt in Vienna.
Thus Solomon sums up the three primary requirements for her identification, based on his own reading of evidence contained in the letter. But his reasoning is marred by a major flaw: the letters from the Brentano family that Klaus Martin Kopitz published in 2001, in a valiant effort to add some new documents to the debate, show that Antonie cannot have been the “Immortal Beloved.” She was a happily married wife and mother whose brief stay in Prague in July 1812 (less than one day) was spent in searching for an educator for her eleven-year-old son Georg: she had arrived with her husband, five-year-old daughter Fanny, and a maid on 3 July and they all left together for Karlsbad at 6 o’clock the next morning. Where did she have time that night for a tryst with Beethoven? As has been repeatedly argued, her candidacy, which includes the improbable scenario of a “ménage à trois” in Karlsbad,<ref> See the important discussion by Klaus Kropfinger, in: Beethoven, Kassel 2001, p. 125</ref> makes no psychological sense.<ref> See in particular Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, Beethoven und seine „Unsterbliche Geliebte“ Josephine Brunswick, Zürich 1983, pp. 33-40 and passim. See also Tellenbach’s two-part article Psychoanalysis and the Historiocritical Method: On Maynard Solomon’s Image of Beethoven, in: THE BEETHOVEN NEWSLETTER 8/3 (Winter 1993), pp. 84-92, and ibid. 9/3 (Winter 1994), pp. 119-127.</ref>
An additional (external) requirement suggested by Solomon is that the woman possibly is the "A" mentioned by Beethoven in Anton Gräffer's copy of Beethoven's Tagebuch (diary) entry of 1812:
"In the way with A., everything goes to ruin."
Since it is not even sure that Gräffer's transcription of the entry is correct, the letter "A" alone cannot provide basis for a reliable identification. In fact, Beethoven wrote the letter "A" in his found letters in the old German script, which is very different from the Latin form of "A", and the "A" may have been a musical notation. Recent research suggests that the "A" was actually a "St" that referred to Josephine von Stackelberg's husband Count Stackelberg.
