3. Young Beethoven, Nature Explorer

In a letter to his former pupil Theresa Malfatti from May 1810, Beethoven wrote: "How fortunate you are to be able to go into the country so soon. I cannot enjoy this happiness until the 8th, but I look forward to it with childish excitement. How delighted I shall be to ramble for awhile through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear." While living in Vienna, he sought refuge in the country during summer months and grew attached to his favorite places in Baden, Mödling, and Heiligenstadt, among the villages nearby. But the roots of this love of nature likely stemmed from his youth when he lived in the Rhineland, one of the most picturesque regions of Germany. He revealed this longing to Franz Gerhard Wegeler in a letter from June 29, 1801, in which he expresses a desire to visit Wegeler in Bonn: "For my fatherland, the beautiful country where I first opened my eyes to the light, still seems to me as lovely and as clearly before my eyes as it was when I left you. In short, the day on which I can meet you again and greet our Father Rhine I shall regard as one of the happiest of my life." On April 9, 1825, he wrote to Ferdinand Ries in Bonn: "I wish you well in that country of the Rhineland which will ever be dear to me." Near the end of his life, when he was staying at his brother's estate in Gneixendorf (a village in the Danube valley), Beethoven revealed something of this longing: "The district where I am now staying reminds me somewhat of the Rhine country which I so greatly long to see again. For I left it long ago when I was young." This part of the exhibition explores young Beethoven's experience of the natural landscape of the areas around Bonn.