Joyce Maier, in response to me:


>>>... I know -by inside information- that there's an unpublished Beethoven
>>>letter in which he wrote some striking and amazing lines about the
>>>Brentano family.
>>
>>Please, tell me what does that letter says!!!.

>Beethoven writes that the Brentanos are such useful friends because of
>their money.  He only needs to "pull the tails of these sheep" and yes,
>money again!  Imagine, such a sentence about the woman who is supposed to
>be the woman of his life, his One and Only True Love.  It makes me giggle.

Well.  As I imagined, this proves nothing against Solomon's theory.  I
don't know the date of that letter, but these lines may be the product of:

a) a sincere opinion of Beethoven before falling in love with Antonie.

b) a bitter show of resentment against her and her husband after a broken
(or even frustrated) relationship.

Item a) sounds a bit naif, but very probable, considering Beethoven's
tendency to violent and sudden affective changes.  So does item b), by the
same reason (let's remember what cynical things did he write, in several
occasions, about his beloved Karl).  Such a sentence about "the woman of
his life" sounds perfectly natural coming from Beethoven, because one may
ask what does the expression "the woman of his life" means in the context
of Beethoven's personality.  I mean, there's a tendency to see the letter
to the Immortal Beloved as a testimony of a passionate and eternal love
between two angelical beings.  It's evident that the woman to whom that
letter was addressed corresponded in some way to Beethoven's love, but we
don't know exactly *how*, since is well known that Beethoven's character
was highly given to fancy and even self deceit.  It's also evident that he
kept the letter because that love was very important to him (probably the
only souvenir of his first corresponded relationship), but who knows if she
offered him just a couple furtive encounters --much more than any other
woman in the past--, and later dismissed him for whatever reason?.  An
angry or cynical reaction against her would be the natural consequence of
that.  Of course, all of this proves nothing in favor of Antonie Brentano.


>>Standard readers (among which I count myself) have few possibilities
>>to know if all data provided by Solomon are wrong or right; so, his
>>deduction appears to be very persuasive.
>
>Please, write "seems"  instead of "appears" and I fully agree...

That's exactly what I meant. Sorry, it's my awful English.

>>I know that Solomon's book have many weak points --the Freudian blab
>>among them--, but I find the chapter devoted to the "Immortal beloved"
>>still convincing.  He makes solid deductions after a large series of data.
>
>No, that's an error.  Sly Solomon left out all the counter proofs, like,
>for instance, the letters written by Beethoven to Antonie in the years
>1816/18 and, also far from unimportant, Antonie's pregnancy, already
>present when Beethoven wrote his famous love letter.

I wrote "a large series", not "a comprehensive series".  I don't know the
letters to Antonie, but I don't see why the fact of Antonie's pregnancy
could be an obstacle for an encounter or a relationship with B.


>However, Beethoven never showed any interest in the child, not even when
>the kid fell ill and very seriously indeed.  He stayed a cripple, mentally
>and physically strongly handicapped for the rest of life.  But Beethoven
>stayed in Vienna and focussed completely on his substitute-son, his nephew
>Karl.  Very amusing is a particular line in one of his letters to Antonie,
>written in 1816:  "you will know that I've become a father." Imagine, to
>the woman who had given birth to a boy who may have been his son...  Giggle
>again.

Wait, wait, I think that this is a little anachronistic.  You extrapolate
the mind-frame of a man of our century into a man of the early XIX.  The
emotional concern of parents with their newborn or unborn children was very
weak in those times compared to that of ours.  There's no room here to
develop this subject, but a man in Beethoven's times and conditions would
hardly show any interest in a newborn child that probably wasn't of his
own, no matter how involved might he be with the mother.  An example (and
a similar case to this) may be found in a letter that Byron wrote to James
Wedderburn Webster (Ravenna, July 2, 1819).  Byron tells to Webster that
a "friend" of him (Countess Teresa Guiccioli, his lover, with whom he was
deeply in love) had an abortion.  He shows himself worried about the health
of Teresa, but he talks about the abortion (of a child that very probably
was of his own) as a simple illness, without any emotional concern with
him.  Concerning the line of Beethoven to Antonie in 1816, I don't see
what's wrong with it, since he didn't become a true "physical" father.
The context and the right meaning of those words was surely well known to
Antonie.

Pablo Massa
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