hen he was thirty-two and she
eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.

It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:

"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
compassed half the world with my art--I must do it still. There exists
for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."

But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her,
more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'etais bien aime d'elle, et plus
que jamais son epoux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
meprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as
well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
things?"

Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
three famous letters,