be Beethoven's innamoratas, are liberally sprinkled across the pages of all of his biographies-the Bruening sisters, Bettina Brentano, Magdalena Willman, Countess Guicciardi, Theresa Malfatti, Amalie Sebald, and others more obscure.

It is indeed true that Beethoven wrote perfervid letters to these women, and on many occasions bemoaned the fact that he was not ready to marry at the moment. As he on frequent occasions stated, marriage would have brought the greatest happiness to him, but somehow, things never did work out he repeated his objections that he was not "established." had not sufficient income, that his deafness. made him shy, etc.

Yet at that time, he was living on a regular pension supplied by his three patrons Princes Rudolf, Kinsky and Lobkowitz, and was apparently financially secure. Still he could not muster up enough enthusiasm for marriage, though he was young, and famous, and had only a slight degree of deafness.

The revealing fact is that his great loves, on closer examination, turn out to be unattainable women, such as teenagers, married or engaged women, and women too high above his social station. Somehow, Beethoven was always drawn to the impossible, as the type he had to marry. Oddly enough, in the conventional society of his time in Vienna, when celibacy was relatively rare, there appears to have been no woman satisfactory for marriage.

On the other hand, there were several young men, of about Beethoven's age, with whom he corresponded for the rest of life, and for whom he evinced the greatest affection and con-

cern.

These men were Dr. Franz Wegeler, the Bonn physician, Stephen von Bruening, Karl Amenda, and Ignaz von Gleichenstein, among others.

Although Beethoven can only muster up amatory phrases like these in his unmailed epistles to the "Immortal Beloved'" maiden:

"My angel, my all, my very self!Can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, that I am not wholly yours? . If we were wholly united you would feel the pain of it as little as I do," etc. In his mailed letters to a man, he writes as follows:

To Wegeler (after an argument) "Oh Wegeler! do not cast off this hand of reconciliation; place your hand in mine-O God! but no moreI myself come to you and throw myself in your arms and sue for the lost friend, and you will give your self to me full of contrition who loves and ever will be mindful of you."

Then to Stephen von Bruening, after another argument: "come to my arms once more as you used to do."

According to Rolland, Count Franz Brunsvik, in whose Hungarian castle Beethoven completed the Appassionata, and to whom he dedicated the work. remained a bachelor at 40; was reputed to be not quite normal mentally, and was labeled by his sisters as "an ice cold knight" with no in-

terest in women.

Beethoven's attitudes towards his parents further give us some insight into the true nature of his libido.

Throughout his life. Beethoven reiterated his profound love and reverence for his mother, to a degree which at times seems excessive, but on the other hand, he expressed his hatred for his father who was a drunkard, unscruplous, and who possibly passed along syphilis to his famous son.

Despite Beethoven's adoration for his own mother, he displayed a violent antipathy towards Therese Obermayer, the mother of his famous nephew Carl. Therese married Beethoven's brother while pregnant and for this offense. Beethoven seems never to have forgiven her. He called her

7