The letter Beethoven never addressed
Fifth on the shelf, and the warmest one yet.
Beethoven's Immortal Beloved letter, July 1812 (~71 seconds). Written in pencil across ten small pages, over two days, in a spa town called Teplitz. No address, no envelope, no sign it ever left his hands. It was found among his papers after he died, and it is still in a library in Berlin. He was forty-one.
He had just come off a journey bad enough to break the carriage, and the post out of Teplitz only left on Mondays and Thursdays. So it runs: my angel, my all, my very self. And then, on the last page, three lines: forever yours, forever mine, forever us.
Two hundred years of scholars have argued about who she was. Neither of the two names that survive the arguing ever said a word about it. What is left is a letter addressed to someone, and delivered to a drawer.
Read from my own translation of the German. If you have a letter like that, one you never addressed, or never dared, write to [email protected] and tell me how it starts. The first line you never said, I will say back to you once, recorded, free (first five, one each).