Their lives intersected again in 1822, when Julie and Gallenberg moved back to Vienna, where he’d been hired at the Theater am Kärntnertor. It’s hard to believe that Julie wouldn’t have encountered him. Did she see Beethoven during the trip? There’s no record of it, but he was the musical star of the Congress, conducting his bombastic “Wellington’s Victory” and Seventh Symphony before a crowd of luminaries. Her sister-in-law, Countess Eleonora von Fuchs, was married to an imperial chamberlain, and, according to the Viennese police, Julie was the mistress of a prominent Saxon diplomat. In a city teeming with spies, Julie was one of many, but she had certain advantages. According to local police records, she was an “emissary” for the Murats, who wanted to make sure they’d keep their kingdom. In October 1814, Julie appeared at the Congress of Vienna, the assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. She met Joachim Murat, the King of Naples, and his wife, Caroline, Napoleon’s youngest sister. There her life, never dull, became even more dramatic. In November 1803, Julie wed Count Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg, a composer of modest talents and limited means, with whom she moved to Naples. He complained to his student, the composer Carl Czerny, that it seemed to be all anyone wanted to hear. In 1823, the writer Ludwig Rellstab described the first movement as a lake reposing in the faint shimmer of the moon, and that association eventually caught on.Įven before it became the “Moonlight,” however, the sonata was a hit the dreamy first movement was played so often that Beethoven grew tired of it. When it was published in March 1802, it had only a generic name its romantic title emerged after Beethoven’s death. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact date he recorded his compositional process in sketchbooks, and many pages related to the “Moonlight” have been lost. He confided to Wegeler that he was thinking of marriage, but that the aristocratic young woman wasn’t of his station.Īt some point in 1801, he completed the “Moonlight” Sonata. It’s generally agreed that she is the “dear, enchanting girl” he refers to in a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler. Apart from the social stigma, he knew that it would probably end his brilliant performing career. He became reclusive, afraid of what people would say when they learned that Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso was going deaf. He feared the situation was irreversible and tried to keep it secret. For the previous four years, he’d been suffering from tinnitus, a ringing and buzzing in his ears, and was having trouble discerning high notes. Now Beethoven was encouraging me to mourn, hypnotizing me with doleful, dronelike melody. Both my parents had recently died, but with a heavy workload and my childhood home to sell, I hadn’t given myself time to grieve. ” I’d heard the sorrowful first movement before, but it suddenly touched me differently. When I got home from lunch, I listened to Maurizio Pollini play the “Moonlight. Though I’d studied piano for 12 years, my teacher thought Beethoven’s music was too “agitating” for someone with my “high-strung” temperament. Wagner once described Beethoven as a “titan, wrestling with the gods.” Did I want to wrestle with a titan? I’d never written historical fiction, didn’t read German and knew nothing about early-19th-century Vienna. The editor thought it would make a good novel. She was the woman to whom the great master had dedicated the “Moonlight” Sonata. Four years ago, I was having lunch with an editor who mentioned that Beethoven had fallen in love with one of his piano students.
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