Note 107 — Chapter XIX

“The Sonata in C-sharp minor has asked many a tear from gentle souls who were taught to hear in its first movement a lament for unrequited love and reflected that it was dedicated to the Countess Giulia Guicciardi, for whom Beethoven assuredly had a tender feeling. Moonlight and the plaint of an unhappy lover. How affecting! But Beethoven did not compose the Sonata for the Countess, though he inscribed it to her. He had given her a Rondo, and wishing to dedicate it to another pupil, he asked for its return and in exchange sent the Sonata. Moreover, it appears from evidence scarcely to be gainsaid, that Beethoven never intended the C-sharp minor sonata as a musical expression of love, unhappy or otherwise. In a letter dated January 22, 1892 (for a copy of which I am indebted to Fräulein Lipsius [La Mara] to whom it is addressed), Alexander W. Thayer, the greatest of Beethoven’s biographers, says: ‘That Mr. Kalischer has adopted Ludwig Nohl’s strange notion of Beethoven’s infatuation for Therese Malfatti, a girl of fourteen years, surprises me; as also that he seems to consider the C-sharp minor Sonata to be a musical love-poem addressed to Julia Guicciardi. He ought certainly to know that the subject of that sonata was or rather that it was suggested by—Seume’s little poem ‘Die Beterin’.’ The poem referred to describes a maiden kneeling at the high altar in prayer for the recovery of a sick father. Her sighs and petitions ascend like the smoke of incense from the censers, angels come to her aid, and, at the last, the face of the suppliant one glows with the transfiguring light of hope. The poem has little to commend it as an example of literary art and it is not as easy to connect it in fancy with the last movement of the sonata as with the first and second: but the evidence that Beethoven paid it the tribute of his music seems conclusive.”—“The Pianoforte and its Music,” by H. E. Krehbiel, Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 163, 164.

On page 174, Vol. IV, of the German edition of this biography Dr. Deiters remarks: “The venerated Thayer, it is true, conceived the idea that Beethoven’s Fantasia and Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2, had been inspired by Seume’s ‘Beterin.’ Whoever compares the sonata with the poem will soon realize that there can be no thought of this. We have here, no doubt, a confusion of pieces. It would be easier to think of the Fantasia, Op. 77. Kalischer, who first recognized Thayer’s error, thought of the C-sharp minor Quartet; but this cannot have been in Beethoven’s mind, for it was composed much later.” Grossheim’s letter was written in 1819; the C-sharp minor quartet was composed in 1826. So Kalischer was ridiculously in error. But why does Dr. Deiters suggest the Fantasia, Op. 77? Grossheim was a musician—composer, teacher and conductor—as well as philologist, and when he said “C-sharp minor” it is not likely that he was thinking of a work in G minor. Moreover, the most admirable Dr. Deiters to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not at all difficult to associate the sonata with the poem whose picture of lamentable petition and rising clouds of incense is strikingly reproduced in suggestion by the music of the first movement. Serene hopefulness can be said to be the feeling which informs the second movement; and why should the finale not be the musician’s continuation of the poet’s story?