Beethoven: Unrequited Love

Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte is a bit of a mystery. On its surface, it’s straightforward enough: a song cycle—one of the first of its kind—in which the composer seems to state his own thwarted hopes and longings, his memories of his famous “Immortal Beloved,” with poignant honesty. But Beethoven is a cagey witness. The style, harmonically simple and plain-spoken in ways derived from folk song, conceals gaps in the testimony, both musical and poetic. The cycle’s apparent closed circle, its patterns of self-reference and reminiscence, is, in its own way, another illusion, a gesture of looking back through an art that can only move forward. What did Beethoven want us to hear in An die ferne Geliebte, anyway? The idea that one could hear a composer’s psychology in their works was brand-new in Beethoven’s time, after all. And that letter to the Immortal Beloved was never sent, never seen by anyone but Beethoven until after he died. In the words of another reluctant romantic, Philip Marlowe: a dead man never talks back. Is that why, over two centuries later, we’re still looking for clues?

Presented in partnership with Boston Symphony Orchestra

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Boston