289.—ORIGIN OF THE NAME "KREUTZER SONATA."
The great composers frequently dedicated their works to friends or patron princes whose names are known to us only by this fact of their appearing on the title pages of some masterpiece.
Sometimes, musicians who were famous in their own day have had their very names forgotten in our times, were it not that some such dedication keeps their memory alive.
So it was with Rudolph Kreutzer, once a famous violinist and composer. To him Beethoven dedicated his great sonata for violin and piano, Opus 47, the sonata universally known as the "Kreutzer Sonata."
But it was only an accident and a whim of the composer's that gave Kreutzer this celebrity. Beethoven had intended to dedicate this sonata to Bridgetower, a young violinist of his day, and, by the way, a native of Africa. But before the sonata was published Beethoven and Bridgetower quarreled over a very commonplace subject, i.e., a young lady.
As a result, the friendship was broken off and Bridgetower's name erased from the title page and that of Kreutzer substituted. But the peculiar part of it is that Beethoven is said to have known Kreutzer but slightly, and more than that, never to have seen him!