Immortal Beloved

The Immortal Beloved (German “”) is the addressee of a love letter which composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote on 6 or 7 July 1812 in Teplitz (then in the Austrian Empire, now in the Czech Republic). The unsent letter is written in pencil on 10 small pages. It was found in the composer’s estate following his death and is now in the Berlin State Library. Beethoven did not specify a year or a location. In the 1950s an analysis of the paper’s watermark yielded the year, and by extension the place of the letter. Scholars disagree about the intended recipient of the letter. Two people favored by most contemporary scholars are Antonie Brentano and Josephine Brunsvik. (Other possibilities include Johanna van Beethoven, Julie (“Giulietta”) Guicciardi, Therese Brunsvik, Amalie Sebald, Dorothea von Ertmann, Therese Malfatti, Anna Maria Erdődy, and Bettina von Arnim.) Text analysis After Schmidt-Görg (1957) published 13 then-unknown love letters by Beethoven to Josephine Brunsvik, it became clear that the one to the “Immortal Beloved” was not the only love letter authored by him. That Josephine could have been the unknown woman was subsequently suggested by analyses of similarities in wordings