If music be the food of love, play on

In July 1812, Ludwig van Beethoven was 41. Ten years before, when he had started to lose his hearing, he had contemplated suicide. But he decided to live for his art and went on to write many masterpieces, including his Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies, Fifth Piano Concerto, Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas and five groundbreaking string quartets.

His personal life, however, was a mess. His deafness was worsening, he had gastric trouble and didn’t get along with his younger brothers,. He himself lived alone in Vienna.

Since his teenage years, according to a friend, he had been “always in love.” But no love ever lasted. In the autumn of 1811, he had made the acquaintance of Antonie Brentano, wife of a Frankfurt businessman.

Beethoven began visiting her. He played to her when she was ill, composed a piece for her daughter to play and wrote a song called For the Beloved.

In June 1812, Beethoven took off for the Bohemian spa of Teplitz,stopping over in Prague. On July 1, Brentano and her husband Franz, also stopped in the city. One of the mysteries of Beethoven’s life is what happened in Prague on the night of July 3.

Beethoven failed to keep a business appointment that evening. He left Prague the following day and on July 6 wrote a passionate letter, in pencil, to a woman. He does not name her. He addresses her as his “immortal beloved.”

It was found in his desk after his death. But it does imply he spent at least part of the night of July 3 with the woman he was writing to.

Who was she? Scholars have debated this question for centuries. Antonie Brentano was certainly in Prague that night, but so was her husband, who Beethoven considered a friend.

Whoever she was, Beethoven’s immortal beloved precipitated a creative crisis that took him four years to resolve.

He spent months alone, reading, with only cheap red wine for company. The breakthrough came in 1816, when he wrote a song cycle called An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). Two years later, beginning with Piano Sonata Opus 101, he wrote himself into the astounding burst of creativity that would produce his Ninth Symphony.

This was his “late style,” the most sublime of all Beethoven’s music. But there had been a glimmer of it, late in 1812, his year of crisis, in three, small, eerie Equali for Four Trombones.

An equale was a specialty of Linz — a piece played by a trombone quartet at funerals and on All Souls’ Night. Beethoven wrote his Equali three months after his passionate letter. They would be played at Beethoven’s funeral in 1827 and at the funeral of Edward VII, when they were praised for their “weird simplicity and exquisite pathos.”

In miniature, these poignant evocations foreshadow the glorious late style of his final quartets. Perhaps, to their composer, these little pieces marked the death of love itself.