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Updated: May 4, 2025
"And I promise you, dearest, we will. Just let me get through the next fortnight, and then I shall be freer. We'll take the train, and go back to Rochlitz, or anywhere you like. In the meantime, take more care of yourself. You are far too pale. You will go out tomorrow, yes? to please me?" But this was a request he had often made, and generally in vain.
Rochlitz relates that when he travelled with his wife through picturesque regions he gazed attentively and in silence at the surrounding sights; his features, which usually had a reserved and gloomy, rather than a cheerful expression, gradually brightened, and then he began to sing, or rather to hum, till suddenly he exclaimed: "If I only had that theme on paper."
That musician was Beethoven, to whom Rochlitz bore a commission for music to "Faust" from Breitkopf and Hartel in 1822. The Titan read the proposition and cried out: "Ha! that would be a piece of work! Something might come of that!" but declined the task because he had the choral symphony and other large plans on his mind.
A commission that must have gratified Beethoven exceedingly, but which, however, was not acted upon, was that which emanated from Breitkopf and Härtel, who sent the famous critic Friederich Rochlitz to Vienna in July, 1822, with a proposition that he write some Faust music in the style of the Egmont music.
The more solid German music was neglected in favor of Rossini, and Beethoven felt this change of front keenly, making it the subject of remark to Rochlitz and to others. It can readily be supposed that works like the Mass in D are not easily produced. To get his materials for it Beethoven penetrated deeply the mystery surrounding life.
"I should like to see you happier, Louise yes, yes, I know! but I mean perfectly happy, as you were sometimes at Rochlitz. Since we came back, it has never been just the right thing say what you like." "If only we had never come back!" "If you still think so, darling, when I've finished here, we'll go away at once. In the meantime, patience." "Oh, I don't mean to be unreasonable!"
It was also impossible, she found, to live through again days such as they had spent at Rochlitz; time past was past irrevocably, with all that belonged to it. And it was further, a mistake to believe that a more intimate acquaintance meant a keener pleasure; it was just the stimulus of strangeness, the piquancy of feeling one's way, that had made up half the fascination of the summer.
Many years afterward, in 1822, in an interview with Rochlitz who made a pilgrimage from Leipzig to make his acquaintance, he reverts to this time. "Since the Carlsbad summer when I met Goethe, I read him every day, that is when I do read. He has killed Klopstock for me, but Goethe he lives and he wants us all to live. This is why it is so easy to make music to his words."
The same year she sang at Dresden with the utmost success, in a new rôle in Goethe's "Tasso," in which she was said to surpass her Fidelio. For several years Mme. Schröder-Devrient resided in perfect seclusion in the little town of Rochlitz, and appeared to have forgotten all her stage ambition.
But they had arranged to go away again, on the following Saturday, and, in the present state of things, the few intervening days seemed endless. Louise shut herself up, and would see little of him. The next week, and the next again, were spent in the same fashion. A fine and mild October ran its course. For the fourth journey, towards the end of the month, they had planned to return to Rochlitz.
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