The great composer Ludwig van Beethoven often disgraced himself in
public (he threw a bowl of hot stew at a waiter), was once arrested
and charged with dereliction, and was widely believed to be mad.
His clothes were so rumpled and dirty that street urchins would
mock him. He had trouble holding on to servants, and what few
friends he had, when they came to his flat, had to put up with
stench from an unemptied chamber pot that he kept beside his piano.
He became deaf. Mysterious ailments further isolated him from human
society. Loneliness and desperation leap from the pages of his
intimate letters and scribbled entries in his notebooks. He
contemplated suicide. His relations with women were troubled and
short-lived: at age forty he impulsively proposed marriage to a
fifteen year old girl-who rejected him. Other liaisons came to
naught. He wrote an opera about conjugal love in which the heroine,
Leonora, rescues her husband from a dark cell under a fortress: one
suspects this choice of subject reflects the composer's own need to
be rescued, the need for such a woman in his own life. But a woman
did come into his life-a woman different from all the others. After
his death a few friends discovered a small compartment in his
writing desk secured by a bent nail. In it was a three part love
letter that he wrote to a woman who claimed that she loved him; he
called her his immortal beloved. We have long wondered who this
woman is. We now believe she is Antonie Brentano. What took place
between these lovers? Mr. Gregory's novel explores the fears and
doubts that must have afflicted the great composer as the
star-crossed lovers come together in a locked embrace.
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