Beethoven's Only Beloved: Josephine: A Biography of the Only Woman Beethoven ever Loved Review

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Beethoven's Only Beloved: Josephine: A Biography of the Only Woman Beethoven ever Loved ReviewAfter Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach's exceptional musicological work, "Beethoven und seine Unsterbliche Geliebte Josephine Brunswick" [Beethoven and his Immortal Beloved Josephine Brunsvik], it was already clear who Beethoven's only beloved was. John E Klapproth summarizes in his book again everything already known as well as new material on this subject, and he elaborates in particular the character of Josephine.
The author ingeniously uses musical concepts as section headings. Each year of the relationship between the two lovers is treated in a separate chapter. A clear, easy to look up life story is provided to the reader.
Thus one is enticed to read the book (as a German), even though it is in English. Fortunately Klapproth at least provides the German quotations in the original language. Because even the love terms Beethoven had chosen for his beloved Josephine sound strangely sober, prosaic, even flat in the English translation. This is of course not Klapproth's fault. German terms that go deep into one's soul do not match the equivalent English expression (e.g., "my everything" for Beethoven's "mein Alles"; "happyness" for "Gluckseligkeit"; "opposite sex" for "das andere Geschlecht"! awful!).
Tellenbach's book appeared in 1983, before the opening of the "Iron Curtain". Therefore important documents in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to support her research results were not yet available. Such documents - and Klapproth refers to them - have been found by another musicologist, first published in 2002 in "Österreichische Musikzeitschrift" 57/6: Rita Steblin, "Josephine Gräfin Brunswick-Deyms Geheimnis enthullt: Neue Ergebnisse zu ihrer Beziehung zu Beethoven" [Countess Josephine Brunsvik-Deym's Secret Revealed: New Results on her Relationship to Beethoven].
They all arrive - together with other researchers - at the same result: "The `Immortal Beloved' was Josephine and no one else" (Steblin).
Beethoven, as a human being, now appears to us in all his profoundness and grandeur, corroborated by a better assessment of Josephine's noble character and her aspirations: She sacrificed her great love for the sake of her children whom she would have lost in case of a marriage to Beethoven who was "only" a commoner. That was the law and the custom of the nobility at the time. And the narrow-minded snobbery of the Brunsviks only aggravated the emotional distress of the two great lovers.
Klapproth's book is a treasure trove of quotations from all major documents on the subject in question. He dedicates a separate chapter to the misleading interpretations by the American writer Maynard Solomon whose psychoanalytic speculations about Beethoven are downright slander. Although they were already clearly refuted by Tellenbach, they are nevertheless, as observed by Klapproth, recommended to the German public by the German "Beethoven-establishment".
Klapproth's valuable book should be widely distributed, and one must hope that a German translation will follow soon.
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