Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that “In Vienna, at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a hearing.  I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know, each of Beethoven’s beloved ones was of high rank.”

To continue the catalogue.  There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing Psyche’s wings with a torch; it is inscribed:  “A New Year’s gift for the tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend, Beethoven.”

There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, “because he was very ugly and half crazy,” as she told her niece.

An army captain cut him out with Fraeulein d’Honrath; his good friend Stephan von Breuning won away from him the “schoene und hochgebildete” Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged; she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto.  He wrote a letter beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan.  Then he loved Fraeulein Therese von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him.  He called her the “volatile Therese who takes life so lightly.”  She married the Baron von Droszdick.  We have a letter wherein Beethoven says:  “Farewell, my dearest Therese; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.  Think of me kindly, and forget my follies.”  She had a cousin Mathilde—­later the Baroness Gleichenstein—­who also left a barb in the well-smitten and accessible target of his heart.  Even Hummel, the pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fraeulein Roeckel.

The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdoedy (nee Countess Niczky) is listed among his flames, though Schindler thinks it “nothing more than a friendly intimacy between the two.”  Still, she gave Beethoven an apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a servant extra money to stay with him—­a task servants always required bribing to achieve.  But Thayer says that such a menage could not last, as Beethoven was “too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too easily injured and too hardly reconciled.”  Beethoven dedicated to her certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him.  In his letters he calls her his “confessor,” and in one he addresses her as “Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Graefin,” showing that she was his dearie to the fourth power.

Also there was Amalie Sebald, “a nut-brown maid of Berlin,” a twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain.  In a letter to Tiedge in 1812, Beethoven says: