Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven’s directions—­ “amoroso,” “a malinconico” and the like.

Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of the composer’s outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her one.  At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat.  The trick was discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on the head of the suggester of the mischief.

Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven’s acting as "postillon d’amour" by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.

Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the dedications prefixed to his compositions.  The piano sonata, Op. 7, was inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake “der Verliebte.”  Other “gewidmets” were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdoedy, von Brunswick, Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his “liebe, werthe, Dorothea Caecilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.

All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly, and half-savage man.  It is not so long as Leporello’s list of Don Juan’s conquests, “but, marry, t’will do, t’will serve.”  I find I have catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor’s three daughters as one).  And more are to come.

And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you’ll find Von Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that “Beethoven was never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love passages in his life,” while Francis Hueffer can speak of “his grand, chaste way.”  On this latter point there is room for debate.  Crowest adopts both sides at once by saying:  “In the main, authorities concur in Beethoven’s attachments being always honourable.  There can be no doubt, however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side.”  Thayer takes a middle ground,—­that, in the Vienna of his time and his social grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan, while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind.  He could not endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased him.  All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man’s wife, and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.

Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did he never marry?  Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art.  To say, “Poor Beethoven!” is like pitying the sick lion in his lair.  Yet what is more pitiful?  Love was the thorn in this lion’s flesh, and there was no Fraeulein Androcles to take it away.