Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/39

 to have always been of the purest kind. With him there was no connection between passion and pleasure. The confusion established between the two things nowadays only shows how little most men know of passion and its extreme rarity. Beethoven had something of the Puritan in his nature; licentious conversation and thoughts were abhorrent to him; he had always unchangeable ideas on the sanctity of love. It is said that he could not forgive Mozart for having prostituted his genius by writing Don Giovanni. Schindler, who was his intimate friend, assures us that "he spent his life in virginal modesty without ever having to reproach himself for any weakness." Such a man was destined to be the dupe and victim of love; and so indeed it came about. He was always falling violently in love and ceaselessly dreaming of its happiness, only however to be deceived and to be plunged in the deepest suffering. In these alternating states of love and passionate grief, of youthful confidence and out- raged pride, we find the most fruitful source of Beethoven's inspiration, until at length his fiery, passionate nature gradually calms down into melancholy resignation.

In 1801 the object of his passion appears to have been Giulietta Guicciardi, whom he immortalised in the dedication of the famous (so-called) "Moonlight" Sonata, Opus 27 (1802). "I now see things in a better light," he writes to Wegeler, "and associate more with my kind. This