nd where the music when
_Leonora_ levels her pistol at the villain reaches a climax as
thrilling as is to be found in any dramatic work, musical or literary.
Obviously, it was the intensely dramatic situation which here inspired
Beethoven to the grandest effort of his genius.

It has often been asserted that the best numbers in "Fidelio" were
directly inspired in Beethoven by the emotional exaltation resulting
from one of his unhappy love affairs. Mr. Thayer doubts this story,
because he could not find anything in Beethoven's sketch-books
corroborating it; but even if it should be a myth, there are many well
authenticated facts which show that Beethoven, like other composers,
owed many of his best ideas to the magic influence of love in
stimulating his mental powers. He dedicated thirty-nine compositions
to thirty-six different women, and it is well known that he was
constantly falling in love, had made up his mind several times to
marry, and was twice refused. Female beauty always made a deep
impression on him, and Marx relates that "even in his later years he
was fond of looking at pretty faces, and used to stand still in the
street and gaze after them with his eyeglasses till they were out of
sight; if anyone noticed this he smiled and looked confused, but not
annoyed. His little Werther romance he had lived at an early age in
Bonn. In Vienna, he is said to have had more than one love affair and
to have made an occasional conquest which would have been difficult
if not impossible to many an Adonis."

Weber's "Freischuetz" doubtless owes much of its beauty to the fact
that it was written but a few months before the composer's marriage.
In one of his letters to his betrothed he writes, "Yesterday I
composed all the forenoon and thought of you _very often_, for I was
at work on a scene of _Agatha_, in which I still cannot attain all the
fire, longing, and passion that vaguely float before me." And his son
testifies that Weber's love influenced all his work at the time. "It
was the reason," he says, "that Weber took to heart, above everything
else, the part of _Aennchen_, in which he saw an embodiment of his
bride's special talent and characteristics, and it was under the
fostering stimulus of this warm feeling that he allowed those parts of
the opera in which _Aennchen_ appears to ripen first. The first note
which he wrote down for the 'Freischuetz' belongs in the duo between
_Aennchen_ and _Agatha_." He adds that his