Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was early orphaned of his mother.  In the first letter we have of his, he says:  “She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.  Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name of ‘mother!’ to ears that heard?  Whom now can I say it to?  Only to the mute image of her that my fancy paints.”

This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of his life-long griefs—­lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia.  He had no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.

And then his deafness!  When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music.  He lived, indeed, as he said, inter lacrimas et luctum.

The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of themselves.  There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve his turn on earth in spite of all.  He was the very King Lear of music, trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.

To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while longingly sought.  I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been.  There were two others whom he deeply loved.  One of these was the famous Italienne, whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication of his “Moonlight Sonata” (Op. 27, No. 2)—­“alla damigella contessa Giulietta Guicciardi." It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so passionately despairing in its close.  She had been his pupil.  She told Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put her own name over the “Moonlight Sonata” instead.

It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801: