Five years later we learn of Beethoven’s receiving letters and presents from “a Bremen maiden,” a pianist, Elise Mueller.  And there was a poetess who also annoyed him.

In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of “the beautiful and amiable” Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz.  He had met her in 1812, and admired her playing.  As late as 1826 we have letters from her, inviting him to visit her in Gratz.  But in 1817—­he being then forty-seven years old—­the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler, who observed it, called it an “autumnal love,” though the woman’s son later asserted that it was only a kinship of “artistic sympathy,”—­in fact, Beethoven called her “a true foster-mother to the creations of his brain.”  Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after she married.  Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of Bettina Brentano von Arnim.  This freakish young woman had some acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged to have been sent to her by him.  She also gave the world certain letters said to have come to her from Beethoven.  It has been pretty well proved that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large scale.  She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of Goethe’s “garden of girls” before he ever met Bettina.  But she appears to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on fact.  The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and recognised Beethoven’s script.  Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven’s life, “a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty, her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths.”

Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven’s love affairs were always with women of high degree.  But others have called him a “promiscuous lover,” because he once used to stare amorously at a handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil Ries, who wrote:  “Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly respectable daughters.”  In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion to these girls.  But such a flirtation means little, and besides they were beauties, these daughters of the tailor.  And Beethoven’s own mother was a cook.

Ries describes him as a sad flirt.  “Beethoven had a great liking for female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass, and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was observing him.  He was always falling in love with some one, but generally his passion did not last long.  Once when I teased him on his conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted him longest, and most seriously of all—­namely, seven whole months!”