On the Flip with Beethoven's Für Elise
The Backstory
Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor, WoO 59 ("Für Elise")
I'm Beethoven, and I'd like to welcome you to the backstory of Für Elise, a little piece with a surprisingly long afterlife. You'll learn how a page of mine went missing and why the name on it rests on one scholar's word, which makes it a small mystery worth a few minutes. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our music when you hear it, so try your luck in the Trainer .
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A Hit I Never Got to Enjoy
I wrote Für Elise in April 1810, and then, as far as anyone can tell, I never published it. It sat unprinted for the rest of my life, and I died in 1827 without ever seeing it in a shop window. It finally appeared in print in 1867, about forty years after my death. So the piece the whole world hums today began as a small page of music that almost nobody saw.Matters of the Heart, Spring Edition
That spring I was in love with Therese Malfatti, and I fully intended to marry her. She turned me down, which is a hard thing to hear when you have just been polishing a tender little melody. I won't claim the piece is a love letter, because nobody can prove that. Still, it's hard to imagine a gentler tune coming from a man in the middle of that kind of year.The Case of the Wandering Manuscript
The handwritten manuscript is the heart of the mystery, because it has been missing ever since it was last seen. The Beethoven-Haus says Therese Malfatti owned it, though Wikipedia names a woman called Babette Bredl in Munich instead. Nobody has settled which of them is right, so I'll only say that the story goes both ways. What's certain is that the page passed through hands I never knew about before it reached the man who printed it.Enter the Professor
That man was a scholar named Ludwig Nohl, who said he had seen my manuscript with his own eyes. He published the piece in 1867 in a book called Neue Briefe Beethovens, printed in Stuttgart. He called it simply "Clavierstück in A moll", which means a piano piece in A minor. The catchy name Für Elise came from him too, and it stuck far better than his own title did.A Dedication You Can't Check
Nohl reported that the page carried the words "Für Elise am 27 April [1810] zur Erinnerung von L. v. Bthvn." That means "For Elise, in remembrance, from L. v. Bthvn.", with my name abbreviated. The trouble is that the manuscript vanished after he printed it, so only his report of the inscription survives. Nobody can look at the page and confirm that he read it correctly, or even that it said exactly that.Elise, Whoever You Are
Here is the awkward part: no record shows any woman named Elise among the people I knew. One scholar, Max Unger, suggested that Nohl misread my handwriting and that the page really said "Für Therese". That would point straight back to Therese Malfatti, which makes a tidy ending to the love story. It's only a suggestion, though, and a neat explanation isn't the same as a proven one.The Lineup of Suspects
Other researchers have offered different Elises, and each theory has its own supporters. Klaus Martin Kopitz proposed the soprano Elisabeth Röckel, whom a letter from Milder-Hauptmann in 1830 called "Elise". Rita Steblin put forward Elise Barensfeld, a young prodigy, and she herself calls that idea speculative. So the honest answer to "Who was she?" is still that nobody knows.A Small Piece for a Small Keyboard
The music is shaped like a rondo, which means the main tune keeps coming back, in the pattern A-B-A-C-A. After the bright middle section, the C section returns to A minor and feels a bit like a coda, as if the piece is gathering itself to leave. The whole thing stays within about two octaves, which suited the keyboards of my day and has nothing to do with a modern 88-key piano. The tempo is given as Poco moto, a gentle push forward, so it should never feel hurried.Scribbles Among the Big Projects
A few sketch leaves for the piece survive today at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. They share a sheet with a march, WoO 19, and with music for Egmont, Op. 84, so the little bagatelle was sitting next to much weightier work. That fits the time, because 1810 falls in my middle period, which people date from 1802 to 1812. It reminds me that a piece doesn't need to be grand to be worth writing down.The Joke Time Played on Me
I had moved from Bonn to Vienna in November 1792, and by around 1798 my hearing had begun to fail. By 1810 I was already living with that struggle, and I wrote this piece without any idea where it would end up. I couldn't have imagined that a quiet piece I never published would become the tune beginners reach for first. I'm glad it found its audience in the end, even if it took a missing page, a careful scholar and a name that nobody can fully explain.---
So that's the story of a small piece that took a very long road to reach you. I wrote it in the spring of 1810, and I still find it remarkable how far it has traveled since. The page I wrote is lost, and the name Elise has never been tied to one person with any certainty. Perhaps that's part of the charm, because a little mystery leaves room for every listener to imagine their own answer. Ludwig Nohl was the scholar who gave the piece its title, and without him it might never have reached you at all. Did you enjoy learning about the backstory of Für Elise? I hope it made the tune feel a little more like an old acquaintance than a melody you happen to know. There's still plenty more to explore, from the way the rondo comes back to its opening tune to the keyboards I had in front of me when I wrote it. If you'd like to keep going, please click on the links below and see what else you can discover about Für Elise. And the next time you hear those two rocking notes, I hope you'll smile and think of the page that went missing.