In spite of his mercurial temperament, Beethoven was never without friends. ‘Friendship is a shade in sunlight and a shelter in a downpour of rain’, he told Johannes Buel, when the tutor to Count von Browne's son left Vienna for his home in Switzerland in 1805. ‘Reflect back … and you [will realize] that we saw each other too little.’ Beethoven felt the loss of particular friends keenly; friends like Karl Amenda, a Lutheran pastor and talented violinist who had left Vienna for Latvia in 1799. ‘A thousand times I recall you to mind and your patriarchal simplicity’, he wrote in a letter to Amenda on 12 April 1815. ‘How often I long to have people like yourself around me.’

Countess Erdödy

Beethoven was especially sorry when he realized that he himself had caused the breakdown in his earlier friendship with Countess Erdödy (noted in Chapter 18), and that in spite of his abject apology to her, relations between them had remained cool for some years. Early in 1815, however, she decided to let bygones be bygones. ‘I have read your letter with great pleasure, my beloved Countess, and also what you say about the renewal of your friendship for me’, he wrote on 29 February, promising to send her manuscript copies of the Archduke Trio and ‘everything else that has not been published … It has long been my wish to see you and your beloved children once again. For although I have suffered a great deal, yet I have not lost my former love for children, the beauties of nature and friendship.’ A case or two of wine and the loan of one of her collection of pianos followed and, judging by Beethoven's jokey letters to the Countess and the no less jokey invitations he received in reply, relations between them became warmer than ever:

‘My dear and beloved Countess!’, Beethoven protested with evident delight.