Beethoven never got to make sweet music with the women he adored
Love inspired his work but according to top music expert...
HE WAS inspired to write musical masterpieces by the women he loved – but Ludwig van Beethoven died a virgin, a major biography claims.
The composer spurned intimacy – which he considered sinful – although he repeatedly fell in love with women he encountered, according to author Norman Lebrecht.
‘We can be absolutely certain Beethoven never had sex within a relationship,’ he says.
‘We can be 98% certain that he never had sex at all. He needed love as a stimulus for creation but he avoided intimacy, regarding it as tantamount to a sin, a violation of shining ideals.’
Mr Lebrecht reached his conclusion after studying hundreds of pages of historical records and the ‘conversation books’ which the German composer – who was deaf from the age of 30 – used to communicate with his visitors.
The classical music expert said there was no doubt Beethoven ‘serially fell in love’, but these infatuations never translated into a physical relationship. He believes Beethoven’s obsession with his work, his deafness and complex psychological factors meant he never consummated his passion.
The author said: ‘Beethoven comes from two generations of alcoholics. His father was quite brutal and violent both towards him and his mother. Beethoven felt protective of his mother.’ He added that after the composer’s mother Maria died, she lived in his mind as ‘an untouchable ideal, as a female who has to be protected from male violence – and of course part of male violence can be sex’.
Mr Lebrecht believes an incident in the composer’s early life, when he made a pass at a friend’s daughter, is telling. He said: ‘One finds tracings of earlier fumbling, nothing more. The point is he is way over the top in the horror of his own conduct. As it happens the girl forgives him and remains his lifelong friend. But that’s how he is with women, he doesn’t trust himself with them.’
Lebrecht believes the sensitive Beethoven was also appalled by the moral depravity he encountered on arriving in Austria at the age of 21, saying he was ‘repelled by Viennese carnality and the corruption of the rich. This is a city where wealthy people would buy pubescent daughters from their musicians so they could personally deflower them.
‘It was Sodom and Gomorrah. When Beethoven was invited by a friend to a brothel, he makes it clear that he has no intention of attending.’
Mr Lebrecht said previous claims the composer may have frequented such places were probably the result of mistranslations – saying that ‘a lusthaus’ was a café at the time, not a brothel as the name implies.
Mr Lebrecht said Beethoven tended to fall in love with unobtainable women. ‘He falls in love serially in his late 20s. Then as he turns 40, he starts falling in love again serially both because he needs it as a romantic stimulus for the work he is doing and because he realises he doesn’t have family. He is alone in the world. But by this stage he is 41, shabby and malodorous.’
■ Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon In 100 Pieces, is published by Oneworld on Thursday.
‘He fell in love, but was shabby and malodorous’