Extracts from memoirs and diaries compiled by Ian Irvine
Meetings of great minds
1812Beethoven and Goethe meet in the summer at the fashionable Bohemian spa of Teplice: The composer was then 41, the poet 62. Beethoven later reported: “How patient the great man was with me! How happy he made me then! I would have gone to death, yes, ten times to death for Goethe.”