Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight.  Composers’ widows live long.

Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights, for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of the relations of man and woman.  They were lovers always.

CHAPTER XIV.

BEETHOVEN:  THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE

“No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of it, his success and his immortality.”

So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven well and loved him well, and as mutely as “a violet blooming at his feet in utter disregard.”

Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.  He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—­all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him.  But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.

A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting women’s loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.

Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Haendel, despised the pleasures of the table; he substituted a passion for nature.  “No man on earth can love the country as I do!” he wrote; and proved it in his life.  His mother died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von Breuning, of Bonn.  Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed “Lorchen,” seems to have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters.  He still had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.

Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the cafe where Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.  Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch, whom eventually she married.  Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish Jeannette d’Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love ditties.  Then came Fraeulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the Wertherlike fashion.