Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 30, 1995 TAG: 9502020007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVEN BROWN ORLANDO SENTINEL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They're probably aware that he was deaf through much of his adulthood. They may know that he was a virtuoso pianist. Some have heard that, as he lay on his deathbed, he shook his fist at a storm raging outdoors just before he expired.
The last item is a famous story, but it never happened. When it comes to famous lives, fiction often has a way of working itself in among the facts. That is demonstrated again in the movie ``Immortal Beloved,'' which opened last week at the New River Valley Mall in Christiansburg.
It's not unusual for a movie to mix fact and fancy. What's remarkable this time, though, is that the real-life case may be even more colorful than the movie version.
``Immortal Beloved'' is built around one of the most tantalizing unsolved questions about Beethoven: Who was the inspiration for the composer's 10-page love letter, which had no addressee, may never have been mailed, and was only discovered after his death?
For more than 150 years, scholar after scholar has tried to identify the mystery woman - known in the English-speaking world as the ``Immortal Beloved,'' an approximate translation of a German phrase Beethoven uses to salute her. The film doesn't even quote the most passionate parts of the letter, where Beethoven's thoughts spill out with no concern about niceties of punctuation or grammar.
``No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never,'' Beethoven writes partway through. ``Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in Vienna 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?''
By the end of the letter, Beethoven's handwriting has become such a scrawl that ``the words seem to tear themselves apart,'' as biographer George Marek describes it.
``Be calm; for only by calmly considering our lives can we achieve our purpose to live together - Be calm - love me - Today - yesterday - what tearful longing for you - for you - you - my life - my all - all good wishes to you - Oh, do continue to love me - never misjudge your lover's most faithful heart.''
In the film, a friend of Beethoven's - Anton Schindler - sets off to interview women who knew Beethoven, in hopes of discovering who inspired the letter. What makes the real-life story so striking is that there are many more possible women than the film depicts.
Although Beethoven was physically unattractive, ill-groomed, prone to moodiness and hard of hearing - eventually deaf - he still had a long series of close relationships with women. And these women were generally young, well-educated, beautiful and prominent in society.
``Beethoven was never out of love, and usually was much affected by the love he was in at the time,'' a friend of his, Franz Wegeler, wrote in an 1838 biography. ``In Vienna, Beethoven ... always had some love affair in hand, and on occasion he made conquests which many an Adonis would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to encompass.''
Over the years, at least eight different women have been proposed by one biographer or another as the ``Immortal Beloved.'' Most of them could never have become his wife, either because they came from noble families - and couldn't have married someone like Beethoven, who didn't - or because they were already married.
As scholars have sifted through clues in the letter and studied the various women's lives, most candidates have been eliminated.
There are two, said William Meredith, director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at California's San Jose State University. One is Antonie Brentano, Viennese-born wife of a German businessman. The other is Josephine von Brunsvik, member of a Hungarian noble family.
``The two women who are serious candidates both had babies nine months after the letter was written,'' Meredith said. ``So the real question is: Was one of these Beethoven's child?''
In the film, Schindler not only talks to women he thinks may have loved Beethoven, but he also visits a woman whose relationship with Beethoven was much different: Johanna van Beethoven, widow of the composer's brother Kaspar. With her, the movie takes up an even more dramatic side of Beethoven's life: his battle against Johanna for custody of his nephew Karl, Kaspar and Johanna's son.
The real-life Beethoven wanted to raise the boy himself, and his struggle to accomplish that stretched across the last 12 years of his life. Beethoven's attacks on Johanna's fitness as a mother were every bit as venomous as the movie portrays them. And during the periods Karl was in his uncle's care, the historical Beethoven was just as volatile and obsessive a guardian as the cinematic one - sometimes fawning, sometimes brutal, usually stifling the boy with overprotectiveness.
If anything, the real-life Beethoven's behavior during the battle was more extreme than the movie suggests. As biographer Marek writes, ``a number of delusions emerged which suggest Beethoven was beginning to have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality.''
by CNB