Full circle

‘a kind of community life with the von Breuning family’

In contrast to Beethoven's frequent bouts of illness and worries over Karl, his domestic circumstances were remarkably settled when composing his last two string quartets. Quite by chance, his move in October 1825 to a splendid set of rooms in the Schwarzspanierhaus brought him to within a stone's throw of the apartment of his old friend Stephan von Breuning. Beethoven was twelve years old when he first met ‘his guardian angels’ as he described the von Breuning family. Their widowed mother, Helene, had asked him to give piano lessons to her two youngest children, and it was not long before he was treated as a member of the family – Eleonore, ‘his first serious love’, Stephan, Julie and Lorenz – spending ‘not only the major part of the day, but even many nights there’.

In the mid-1790s, Stephan moved from Bonn to Vienna and spent his entire professional life as a lawyer there in the war ministry. He wrote poetry in his spare time and it was he who revised the original libretto for the 1806 revival of Fidelio. Beethoven dedicated the Violin Concerto to Stephan and the piano version of the concerto to his first wife, Julie, with whom he often played piano duets; as described in Chapter 17, he was distraught when Julie died after only a year of marriage. There were quarrels from time to time, some bitter and prolonged, but they were all forgotten when Stephan, with his second wife, Constanze, and their children, Gerhard and Marie, met Beethoven by chance just before he moved into his new lodgings. Gerhard, who later became a doctor, was an observant twelve-year-old and recalled the meeting fifty years later in his Memories of Beethoven: From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards, a book which he was inspired to write after attending various Beethoven centenary celebrations in 1870.