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Beethoven
The Secret of Beethoven's Immortal Beloved
A Mystery Unveiled
In preparing of Beethoven's Op. 101 for concert performance, I have discovered evidence in the music itself that supports the identity of the famous "Immortal Beloved" as Dorothea von Ertmann. What follows is an excerpt of my discovery. The complete documentation and accompanying musical examples are available on my Beethoven Sonata Opus 101 recording and accompanying booklet which can be found at my recordings link here.
“The Immortal Beloved” and
Beethoven's Sonata, Opus 101
by Willem Ibes
Dorothea von Ertmann, the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 101, is described by Kapellmeister Reichardt as “a beautiful, tall woman of noble appearance and soulful countenance,” who, at a time when women pianists outshone their male counterparts in Vienna, was considered the most gifted interpreter of them all. Beethoven’s factotum, Anton Schindler, was especially impressed by the incomparable way in which the Baroness interpreted the sonata dedicated to her, in which she was able “to grasp Beethoven’s most hidden intentions, as if they had been written under her eyes."
George Marek—supported by H.C. Robbins Landon—found in Dorothea the most likely candidate for the title “Immortal Beloved.” The passionate letter using this encomium was written in 1812. At that time Beethoven was 41 years old, and the “beautiful, soulful” Dorothea, who had been his student since 1803, was ten years younger. Marek’s conclusion, based on extensive archival research, induced me to take another look at the sonata dedicated to Beethoven’s “beloved esteemed Dorothea-Caecilia.” The sonata itself, published in 1817, is one of the few major works on which the composer labored intensively from May of 1815 until November of 1816.
Cover page of the original edition of Opus 101
In 1995 1 gave my first presentation of the Op. 101 after having discovered that every part of every movement of the sonata is constructed on the four-note opening motif (leaving out the non-chord tones) found in the first two measures. Encouraged by a recording grant two years later, I took another look at op. 101 and realized, as in a flash of lightning, that the abstract number “4” clothed a “flesh and blood” person named...Dorothea. Beethoven must have had tremendous fun exhausting all the possibilities inherent in the rhythmic and metrical properties of these four syllables. We find, for example, all kinds of variants of Dorothea—Do-o-ro-o-thea, Do-oro-o-thee, Thea—as well as a whole series of soulful O-thea’s in the first three movements and, in a delightful twist, starting not on the first but on the third beat of the measure, Theodora, in the last movement. To cap it all off, in this last movement Beethoven finds another trick to play with Dorothea’s name (he had always been enamored of puns and word-plays!) when he puts the last “A(h)” in front of Dorothee and ends up with A(h)Dorothee.
At the end of 1998 I published a CD with the accompanying booklet documenting my findings and frankly thought that I was— finally!—done with it. But Dorothea came back once more to nudge me. My technical analysis of the “A(h)” in front of Dorothee was certainly correct, but I had not realized that the phonetic spelling of “A(h)-Dorothee” is “Adoro Te.” Beethoven, like any good Catholic boy at the time, was of course familiar with the Latin hymn beginning “Adoro Te” (“I adore you”). So, in this last movement, the composer has a veritable hey-day with Adoro Te, Adoro Thea, Adoro Dorothee (I adore you, I adore Thea, I adore Dorothee), and tops it off with a delightful Dorothee Adoro Te.
The fun reaches a first culmination in the fugue whose subject, a young man’s exuberant and joyful outburst of love, is a combination of Adoro Te and Dorothea: Adoro Te, Adoro Dorothea (I adore you, I adore Dorothea). It concludes just before the recapitulation with a thunderous, long, drawn-out augmentation of Adoro in the deep bass regions of the piano, and then runs fortissimo all the way up the keyboard: Te Te Te Te (who else!).
First Page of the Score
Beethoven saves proof of the decisive victory for the end. After a few whispered ritardando Adoro Te’s and Adoro Thea’s, he reaches a superb climax in the very last four measures. Following one last whispered Adoro comes the final outburst: fortissimo, a tempo, with the motif in augmention, and ending on a strong first beat—DOROTHEA!! I Adore Dorothea!! There is no longer any doubt that in the realm of art and purified love, Dorothea is and will be his forever.
It seems remarkable that the many authors who have commented on the autobiographical nature of the songs composed between 1815 and 1817—and who have found an intimate relation between these and Beethoven’s love for “die Unsterbliche”—have bypassed this piano sonata. H. Goldschmidt speaks of “a single sorrowful life’s curve” that extends the Master’s Lied-idiom from “An die Hoffnung” over the cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” to Sehnsucht and Resignation. It seems that four years after the letter to “the Immortal,” Beethoven finally is able to traverse that painful territory and exorcise the ghosts that have haunted him all his life in his search for a woman whom he could totally love and who in turn could totally love and fulfill him.
“Hope,” Attainment of the “Far away Beloved” (the cycle concludes with: “these songs will cause to chase away what has kept us so far part”), “Yearning,” and “Resignation” could almost be the descriptive titles of the four movements of Opus 101 with this significant exception that the work ends not in defeat but in triumph. In and through his art Beethoven, once again, is able to attain, transposed into a higher realm, desires which were not given him to fulfill as a mere mortal. The sonata, always recognized as the beginning of Beethoven’s last period, is marked by a tight contrapuntal texture. This has enabled me to score and perform the work—with the help of my friend and colleague Phil Welter—for three voices and sparse piano accompaniment: Beethoven’s one and only Cantata!
I believe that in the music itself is to be found the most convincing internal evidence that Marek was right, that indeed Dorothea von Ertmann, the incomparable interpreter of his music, was also the incomparable “Immortal Beloved.” The first movement represents Beethoven’s entering the past in an attempt to “re-construct” Dorothea, to make her again present to his mind’s eye. Most students of the work have commented on its searching, dream-like quality.
The second movement seems to unfold in a timeless present of the imagination, where all hopes, wishes, and dreams have found fulfillment. It takes just a little of our own imagination to see the Master, hand-in-hand with his Beloved, dancing through the delightful landscape.
In the third movement (sehnsuchtsvoll, “full of yearning”)—a short introduction to the last movement but with an emotional weight that makes it the equivalent of the previous two— both the present/past and the imaginary present can no longer be maintained. Beethoven is inexorably drawn, body and soul, into the past, that fateful summer of 1812, when his hopes of ever finding his feminine ideal were dealt a final blow.
In the last movement, a tentative return of the first movement’s theme gives way to the fullness of the present in pure, unadulterated joie de vivre: I Adore Dorothea!
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