Mignon's Song: Variations on an Essay by Romain Rolland

Märchen, noch so wunderbar,

Dichterkünste machen wahr.

[Fables, so full of wonders / Made true by the poet's art.]

–Goethe, Motto from  Balladen

May 1810 – Spring in Vienna

She had heard one of his sonatas

which had overwhelmed her.

She longs to meet the composer.

Everybody tries to dissuade her.

They say he is unapproachable;

no one even knows where he lives.

More than ever determined,

she takes the risk.

She finds the house;

she enters.

He is seated at the piano

and does not see her.

In 1810 Beethoven was forty. His increasing deafness notwithstanding, he had just composed the "Appasionata" and "Farewell" Sonatas, the "Harp" Quartet, and the "Emperor" Concerto. He was currently writing the overture and incidental music to Goethe's drama, Egmont. He was eager to meet and talk with Goethe face to face, but that was not to happen until the storied meeting in Teplitz two years later in 1812.

When Bettina walked into his life, Beethoven was still madly in love with Theresa Malfatti, and he was smarting from her rejection. Bettina's unexpected appearance was to him a deliverance.

She bends over him –

speaks into his ear.

"I am Betty Brentano."

He turns round suddenly and sees

this pretty young woman

with wide-open eyes

which pierce his very thoughts.

In 1810 Bettina (Betty) Brentano was twenty-five and looked much younger. She was born in Frankfurt in 1785, the daughter of the beautiful Maximiliana La Roche, whom the young Goethe once loved. Her mother died when Bettina was eight, and her father when she was twelve. Educated first in a convent and then among Protestants, she had always a mystical tendency, without, however, being able to connect it with any religion. Her brilliant gifts of art, poetry and music were encouraged by one of her brothers, Clemens.

After reading Goethe in 1806 at age 21, she fell under the spell of his poetry and ideas. She succeeded at last in meeting Goethe in 1807, adding the power of his presence to his reputation. We can assume, given what is known about Goethe and the passion voiced in their correspondence, that the relationship between Bettina and Goethe was indeed physical during these years, but became "filial" after she met and married the poet Achim von Arnim. But however it was expressed, her affection for Goethe lasted for the rest of her life.

Bettina's contemporaries called her Schwärmerin – dreamer, visionary, sentimentalist, zealot. She called herself Mignon, after the orphan girl in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.

She was immediately captivated by him.

She would later write to Goethe,

"When I saw him, I forgot the whole world.

When I remember our meeting,

the world vanishes ...

vanishes ..."

In 1810 Goethe was sixty-one. In 1806 he had at last married Christina, with whom he had been living for eighteen years. His son August was seventeen. Four years later (1814) he was to meet Marianna von Wilmer and a new spring blossomed in his heart, immortalized in  the Westöstlicher Divan.

During this period he seemed enveloped in an ironic distrust of the younger generation and the new spirit of an age that he, perhaps more than any other individual, brought into existence.

He called the generation that followed unheimlich – unfamiliar, sinister, weird, frightening. He could recognize Beethoven's genius in music, but the composer's brash fractious nature put him off. He was still engrossed in the official order of things, and in the tenets of respectability.

She later writes to a friend

about her first encounter

with Beethoven:

"He smiled

and gave me his hand without rising.

'I have just written a fine song for you.'

He sang 'Kennst du das Land'

not meltingly, not softly.

His voice was harsh,

carrying far beyond cultivation

and the desire to please by the urge of passion."

Hmmm. "... just written a fine song for you"? Obviously Beethoven is teasing. He just met her. But certainly he would have immediately recognized Bettina's family name, Brentano, when she uttered it. And surely he knew of her relationship with Goethe – the whole town was talking about it. That's possibly why, on this occasion, he chose to sing that particular song – one that he had composed a year before to the poem "Kennst du das Land" – Mignon's song from Goethe's novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

"He asked, 'Well, how do you like it?'

I nodded, and he sang it

once more with a fire

stirred by the consciousness

that he had communicated his fervor.

"Then he looked at me in triumph,

saw that my eyes and cheeks were aglow,

and naively cried,

'Aha!'"

Bettina's account of Beethoven's voice is surely on the mark – 'harsh," "far beyond cultivation." Other accounts say his singing voice was a deep bass. But according to his friend Louis Schlösser, as he became deaf it "lost its sonority." His laugh was a kind of yelling and his voice was proverbially the voice of a lion. It's difficult to imagine such a "harsh bass" singing his moving setting of Mignon's song. So let's listen to it the way he heard it when he originally composed it.

Here is soprano Pamela Coburn singing "Kennst du das Land.”

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Epilogue

Despite Bettina's attempts to get them together, Beethoven and Goethe still hadn't met in person by 1812. Then in that year, by coincidence, they found themselves in Teplitz at the same time. Beethoven was there working on his Seventh Symphony, and when he heard that Goethe had arrived he decided to call on him. Bettina always assumed she would be there when the meeting of these two giants finally occurred. But she missed it. And there is no record of what was said at this meeting.

The two retained a mutual admiration for each other's genius, but it soon became clear that they were never to be friends. What is now known as "The Incident at Tepitz" suggests an irreconcilable difference in their social and political perspectives.

After the two had talked for a while in Goethe's rooms they decided to go out for a stroll together. While walking they were confronted with a group of patricians and aristocrats also out for a stroll, coming toward them on the same path. Someone had to yield. While there are several versions of what then occurred (it created a faux-scandal ripe for embellishment by town gossips), the core of the story is always the same. The incident was described twenty years later by Bettina who got the story from Beethoven. From her memoires:

"Beethoven said to Goethe:

'Keep walking as you have until now, holding my arm,

they must make way for us, not the other way around.'

Goethe thought differently;

he withdrew his hand, took off his hat and stepped aside,

while Beethoven, hands in pockets,

went right through the dukes and their cortege...

They drew aside to make way for him,

saluting him in friendly fashion.

Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass,

Beethoven told him:

'I have waited for you because I respect you

and I admire your work,

but you have shown too much esteem

to those people.'"

"Incident at Teplitz." Painting by Carl Rohling.