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Updated: June 10, 2025
Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty, her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths." Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were always with women of high degree.
We will note a few of the coincidences between the two writers. Here is the first sentence of the biography: "Ludwig van Beethoven was born to his father, a singer in the chapel of the Elector Max Franz, Archbishop of Cologne, Dec. 17, 1770." Max Franz is confounded with Max Friedrich, a singular mistake, since Wegeler writes the name in full.
Ries relates no such thing. Wegeler does, but of a period five years before Ries came to Vienna; moreover, he relates it in relation to Beethoven's dislike to being urged to play in mixed companies, the fact having no relation whatever to Van Swieten's weekly music-parties. Ib. p. 33. Beethoven is now twenty-five. "At this time, as it seems, there has been no talk of ill health."
Wegeler, who was in the same circle. Many years later he collaborated with Ries's son Ferdinand in writing reminiscences of the master. The names of Count Waldstein and the Von Breunings are indelibly associated with Beethoven's name as friends from the beginning.
It is probably connected with a fact mentioned by Wegeler, p. 95, that Reichardt, who was at that time in Vienna, had advised Beethoven's young pupil, Ries, to apply to the King of Westphalia for the appointment of Kapellmeister, which he had recently given up. This was reported to Beethoven, and roused his ire.
In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16, 1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is less so!
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