Bagatelle in A minor: Für Elise

Among the women Beethovenn is known to have admired - though fromm a distance in most cases - there was a Josephine, a Marie, a Magdalena, a Giulietta, a Bettiina, a Dorothea, more than one Therese…but no Elise. So who was that Elise to whom the most popular of all his piano pieces is apparently dedicated. The unexciting answer is that she probably never existed. According to the Beethoven scholar who discovered the manuscript, long after the composer’s death, it bore the words Für Elise am 27 April zur Erinnerung von L.v.Bthvn - “For Elise on 27th April as a remembrance from Ludwig van Beethoven.” But considering that the manuscript was found among the papers of Therese Malfatti to whom Beethoven (unsuccessfully) proposed marriage in 1810, and bearing in mind that in German handwriting of the time Elise and Therese could easily be confused, there is good reason to believe that we have been doing Therese an injustice ever since the piece was published as Für Elise in 1867.

Unfortunately, the manuscript has disappeared since then and there is no final way of settling the argument. The alternative title of Bagatelle in A minor, which betrays no hint of the essential intimacy of this wistful little piece, is an uncontroversial but unromantic compromise.