About the time of his first meeting with Count Waldstein, Beethoven made another acquaintance, which had an important bearing on his subsequent life.  This was Von Breuning.  He and Beethoven took violin lessons of Franz Ries.  Stephen von Breuning liked Beethoven from the start and introduced him at his mother’s house.  The Breunings were in good circumstances, cultivated, good-natured and hospitable.  They delighted in having him about, and treated him with the utmost consideration.  Madame von Breuning formed a sincere, motherly affection for him; he was soon on a footing in their house almost equal to that of a member of the family.  He went with them about this time on a visit to some of their relations in another city.  They were instrumental in shaping his destiny in various ways, and their friendship was of great moment to him throughout life.  Beethoven, then in his eighteenth year, gave lessons to the daughter Eleonore, as well as to the youngest son, Lenz.  Eleonore afterward married Dr. Wegeler, who was in the same circle.  Many years later he collaborated with Ries’s son Ferdinand in writing reminiscences of the master.

The names of Count Waldstein and the Von Breunings are indelibly associated with Beethoven’s name as friends from the beginning.  When we consider how every circumstance of Beethoven’s family and mode of life tended against his forming desirable friendships, how rough in exterior and careless of his appearance he was, we can ascribe it only to the force of his character that he should have the friendship of such people.  He had done nothing as yet to lead people to believe that he would ever become a great composer.  As has been stated, however, he was a pianist of great originality, with a remarkable talent for improvising, which, no doubt, had much to do in making him a welcome guest wherever he went.

Madame von Breuning, with her woman’s tact, and the fine intuitive perceptions that were characteristic of her, looked after his intellectual development, and was helpful to him in various ways, encouraging him as well in his musical studies.  But Beethoven was by no means an easy person to get along with, as she soon found out.  He was fiery and headstrong, disliking all restraint, being especially impatient of anything that savored of patronage.  She seems to have known that in Beethoven she had before her that rarest product of humanity, a man of genius, and had infinite patience with him.  His dislike for teaching was pronounced, then, as in after years, and she was often at her wits’ end to get him to keep his engagements in this respect.  She, in short, did for Beethoven what Madame Boehme did for Goethe many years before, when the poet left his native Frankfort and came to Leipsic.  He was but sixteen, and found in her a friend, counsellor, almost a mother, who not only instructed him about dress and deportment, which soon enabled him to obliterate his provincialism, but showed a motherly solicitude for him, which must have been of great help to him in many ways.