Adelaide (Beethoven)

"Adelaide", Op. 46, (German pronunciation: [aːdəlaːˈiːdə]) is a song for solo voice and piano composed in about 1795 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The text is a poem in German by Friedrich von Matthisson (1761–1831).

During the period he created "Adelaide", Beethoven was in his mid twenties; he had come to Vienna in 1792 to pursue a career and was in the early stages of making a name for himself as pianist and composer. He had only recently completed his studies with Joseph Haydn. A. Peter Brown suggests that in writing "Adelaide," Beethoven was strongly influenced by Haydn's song "O Tuneful Voice" (Hob. XXVIa:42, c. 1795), written by the elder composer shortly before. Like "Adelaide", "O Tuneful Voice" sets a love poem, is in moderate tempo with a steady triplet accompaniment, and wanders from key to key in its middle section.

In composing "Adelaide" Beethoven made many sketches.Barry Cooper assigns the work of composition to "an unusually long time during 1794, 1795, and perhaps 1796." The song was published by Artaria in Vienna; the first edition bears no date, but an advertisement for it appeared 8 February 1797 in the Wiener Zeitung.

Beethoven dedicated the work to Matthisson. The German-language title page may be translated:

The text of "Adelaide" is an early Romantic poem that expresses an outpouring of yearning for an idealized and apparently unattainable woman.

For his poem Matthisson chose an unusual meter, with the pattern trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, trochee. This is a German adaptation of a meter used in ancient Greek and Latin, the Phaelacian hendecasyllable.

The poem clearly struck a chord with Beethoven, whose personal life often centered on his yearnings for idealized and unattainable women. The letter of thanks that Beethoven later wrote to Matthisson testifies to his emotional engagement with the poem:

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