Beethoven and the Art of Amends

“When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.”

In the late 1780s, as the air of revolution was swarming Europe, the young Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) took improbable refuge in Bonn as a piano teacher to a kindly widow’s children. Her husband had died trying to save court documents in a fire when she was twenty-seven and had never remarried, raising their four children by herself — children she w...