Gradually Beethoven settled into a pattern of shifting residences, spending the summer in the Viennese suburbs—Heiligenstadt was a favorite choice—and moving back to the central city in the fall. In 1802, in his celebrated “Heiligenstadt Testament,” a quasi-legal letter to his two brothers, he expressed his agony over his growing deafness. After 1805 accounts of Beethoven's eccentricities multiply. He performed in public only rarely and made his last appearance in 1814.
Although reports circulated among Beethoven's friends that he was constantly in love, he tended to choose unattainable women, aristocratic or married or both. In his letter to the “Immortal Beloved” (presumably never sent and now dated at 1812), he expressed his conflicting feelings for the woman who may have been the sole person ever to reciprocate his declarations. The long-debated riddle of her identity was solved beyond reasonable doubt in 1977 by the American musicologist Maynard Solomon. She was Antonie Brentano, the wife of a Frankfurt merchant and a mother of four. Conceivably, Beethoven's sense of virtue and fear of marriage contributed to his flight from this relationship, with its deeply shattering conflicts.
In 1815, on the death of his older brother, Casper Carl, Beethoven devoted his emotional energies to a costly legal struggle with his sister-in-law for custody of her nine-year-old son Karl. The mother received a temporarily favorable ruling, and only the intervention in 1820 of Beethoven's most powerful patron, the Archduke Rudolph, won the composer custody of his nephew. Beethoven was not an ideal parent and enormous friction developed between the two, contributing to Karl's attempted suicide in 1826.
By 1818 Beethoven had become virtually deaf and relied on small “conversation books,” in which visitors wrote their remarks to him. He withdrew from all but a steadily shrinking circle of friends. Except for the premieres of his Symphony no. 9 and parts of the Missa solemnis in 1824, his music remained fashionable only among a small group of connoisseurs. His prestige was still such, however, that during his last illness he received huge outpourings of sympathy. He died in Vienna on March 26, 1827; tens of thousands witnessed his funeral procession.
Musical Development
Beethoven's major output consists of 9 symphonies, 7 concertos (5 for piano), 17 string quartets, 32 piano sonatas, 10 sonatas for violin and piano, 5 sonatas for cello and piano, an opera, 2 masses, several overtures, and numerous sets of piano variations.