Your most obedient Friend and Servant Beethoven.
It need not be a pompous retraction, but the truth ought to be made plain.
Do not forget the ~First Chapelmaster~, I laugh at such things, but there are ~Miserables~ who know how to dish up such things in the manner, of the cook.
The allusions to a tour in the letters to Gleichenstein and Breitkopf and Härtel, and the provision made in the Agreement for the composer's temporary absence from Austria, acquire a particular significance from one of the notes of Röckel's conversation, namely: "Beethoven in those days was full of the project of traveling, and a plan was marked out of visiting the German cities, then England and finally ~Spain~; upon which last Röckel laid great stress. He was to have accompanied Beethoven; but he could not leave Vienna, on account of having so many of his brothers and sisters[66] sent to him to care for."
In March, 1809, Beethoven, forwarding a letter to his brother, "to be delivered at the apothecary shop 'To the Golden Crown'" in Linz, enclosed in it an envelope, inside of which he wrote the words quoted in a previous chapter, in which he prayed God to put feeling in place of insensibility into his brothers, and bemoaned the fact that, needing some one to help him, he knew not whither to turn. The breach between Beethoven and his brother Karl was now, in business matters, complete; and he needed some one to perform for him many little offices which he could not with propriety demand of Zmeskall, Gleichenstein or Röckel, even had they had the leisure and the will. Hence, about this time, was formed his connection with a certain Franz Oliva, clerk in the employ of Offenheimer and Herz. A singular obscurity rests upon this man's personal history and the exact nature of his relations to Beethoven--an obscurity which even the indefatigable investigator Ferdinand Luib did not succeed in removing. What is certain is this: the relations between them were exceedingly close up to the spring of 1812; afterwards less so; but never broken off entirely until the departure of Oliva in 1820 to St. Petersburg, where he found it for his interest to establish himself as a teacher of languages. In due time the "Wiener Zeitung" published an official notice from the Austrian Government calling upon him immediately to return and justify himself for overstaying his leave of absence under pain otherwise of being proceeded against under the emigration laws of the country. Oliva's reply to this was a very practical one; he took a wife, fixed his Lares and Penates in St. Petersburg and begat a daughter, who, under date of August 26, answered a letter of Otto Jahn's inquiring about her father's relations and correspondence with Beethoven by saying that a fire and the death of Oliva from cholera in 1848, had caused the loss and dissipation of Beethoven's letters and that she was unable to write the details of the intercourse between her father and Beethoven. Inasmuch as she fixed the beginning of this intercourse in 1814, it is not likely that her contribution to this history would have been valuable.