IMMORTAL BEETHOVEN-

a

repressed

homosexual?

by William H. Kupper, M.D.

DF

"He has the guiding light of his genius which frequently illumines his mind like a stroke of lightning while we sit in darkness and scarcely suspect the direction from which daylight will break upon us." (Goethe in a letter to Bettina Brentano).

The scowling figure of the mighty genius Beethoven has baffled all critics who have attempted to discover the true secret of his personality in terms other than "irascible," "preoccupied." or "bitter." In their descriptions of his youth, numerous authors have leaned the other way too to create in the person of this ill-tempered man, the picture of a great lover, a Don Juan who wrote his finest love music mainly for the sake of glamorous women, both presumably known and

unknown.

Yet contradictions stare at us and await rational explanations uncolored by the opinions of the Victorian expositors who were prone to find an-

one

other great lover in every artist they analyzed.

Beethoven is the man whose true love experiences have never been ac curately traced, simply because many of the facts can never become known to us. As Romain Rolland, the noted biographer says: "This man, who is so hard with himself, so scornful of the feminine in man and its effusions, in his private life is extremely reserved so much so that even his intimate friends knew next to nothing of his love affairs and chance alone has preserved for us the solitary letter to the 'Immortal Beloved'."

Many books have been written about the identity of the "Immortal Beloved" this nebulous creature to whom Beethoven wrote flaming letters, never mailed, which were discovered among his effects after his death.

The names of the glamorous women who his biographers insisted had to

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