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Breuning certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless; whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree. From my childhood I have always despised his petty mind.
Beethoven's eyes were at last opened to the injustice done Von Breuning, upon which he wrote him a letter, so imbued with penitence, so fraught with the desire of obliterating his past unkindness, so filled with yearning and tenderness, that it must have compensated Stephen for all the pain of the past years. Accompanying the letter was his portrait painted many years before.
Breuning reduced it to two acts, and two or three of the musical numbers were sacrificed, and in this form it was played twice at the Imperial Private Theatre and again withdrawn. On these occasions it had been given under Beethoven's favorite title, "Leonore."
You will forgive my thus appealing to your kindly sympathies at a time when your own position is sad enough. Stephan Breuning is here, and we are together almost every day; it does me so much good to revive old feelings! Your love of art does honestly rejoice me. Only say how it is to be done, and I will send you all my works, which now amount to a considerable number, and are daily increasing.
About the time of his first meeting with Count Waldstein, Beethoven made another acquaintance, which had an important bearing on his subsequent life. This was Von Breuning. He and Beethoven took violin lessons of Franz Ries. Stephen von Breuning liked Beethoven from the start and introduced him at his mother's house.
I think this shows plainly enough that I attributed no blame to Breuning; but on this he sprang up like a madman, and insisted on sending for the house-steward. Such behavior, in the presence of all those with whom I usually associate, and to which I am wholly unaccustomed, caused me to lose all self-control; so I also started up, upset my chair, left the room, and did not return.
Your friend, Berlin, July 24, 1804. ... You were no doubt not a little surprised about the affair with Breuning; believe me, my dear friend, that the ebullition on my part was only an outbreak caused by many previous scenes of a disagreeable nature.
One is dead, the other still lives. I only wish you could have read the letter I wrote to Breuning, and his to me. No! never can he be restored to his former place in my heart. The man who could attribute to his friend so base a mode of thinking, and could himself have recourse to so base a mode of acting towards him, is no longer worthy of my friendship.
He stood the ordeal for three weeks, and then fled to his beloved Baden, where he appears to have been safe from such annoyances. Genius lives essentially alone. It is too rare to find its like with ease, and too different from the rest of men to be their companion. For many years Beethoven had not been on speaking terms with the friend of his youth, Stephen von Breuning.
He was but sixteen, and found in her a friend, counsellor, almost a mother, who not only instructed him about dress and deportment, which soon enabled him to obliterate his provincialism, but showed a motherly solicitude for him, which must have been of great help to him in many ways. Madame von Breuning interested Beethoven in the classics, as well as in contemporary philosophical literature.
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