st
in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
life he hoped to share.

Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
been another Therese, the Countess Therese von Brunswick. She was the
cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Therese
"adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
"Kiss your sister Therese," and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ca va sans
dire_!--" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
she did not dare?

Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
more definite to Thayer's argument--if one is to believe a book I
stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Therese well for many
years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable
woman I have ever known."

"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
beatified spirit."

He told Fraeulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Therese and
Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed