The gods must send us everything else, whatever must and shall be our fate - your faithful Ludwigīy the following evening, Beethoven is a seething cauldron of longing, that most intoxicating and disorienting of emotions: My heart overflows with a longing to tell you so many things - Oh - there are moments when I find that speech is quite inadequate - Be cheerful - and be for ever my faithful, my only sweetheart, my all, as I am yours. My angel, my very self… Why this profound sorrow, when necessity speaks - can our love endure without sacrifices, without our demanding everything from one another can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, that I am not wholly yours? - Dear God, look at Nature in all her beauty and set your heart at rest about what must be - Love demands all, and rightly so… No doubt we shall meet soon and today also time fails me to tell you of the thoughts which during these last few days I have been revolving about my life - If our hearts were always closely united, I would certainly entertain no such thoughts. In the first one, penned on Sunday, July 5, 1812, Beethoven writes: Like Beethoven’s music, they remain a masterwork of romantic genius. Included in The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time ( public library) - which also gave us Vita Sackville-West’s passionate words to Virginia Woolf and Balzac’s monomaniacal missives - the letters, penned a generation after his mentor Mozart’s stirring love letters, stand as a reminder of the eternal relationship between frustration and satisfaction. Her true identity has spurred entire books, but historians currently believe she was Antonie Brentano - a Viennese aristocrat married to a Frankfurt businessman.īeethoven’s missives to this “immortal beloved,” which include the only known love letter of his to use the informal German du for “you” rather than the formal Sie, were found among his personal effects they were never mailed - a beautiful and tragic testament to the fact that their affair, like all affairs, was both bedeviled and vitalized by the awareness that the two lovers could never fully have each other. It’s only befitting that a man of such extraordinary capacity to elevate the soul with beauty should be the author of some of the most breathtaking love letters of all time.īeethoven never married, but in his early forties he feel deeply in love with a mysterious woman who remains known as “immortal beloved” - the eternally enchanting term of endearment by which the great composer addressed her in his letters. Whenever I find myself with a sunken heart, I promptly put his Ninth Symphony on repeat. Ludwig van Beethoven (December 17, 1770–March 26, 1827) endures as one of the most influential and beloved composers of all time.
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