Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven seems to have tried to forget these bad thoughts by working very hard. He composed a lot more music, including his Third Symphony, called the Eroica. Originally he gave it the title Bonaparte in honour of Napoleon whom he admired. But when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven began to think that he was just a tyrant who wanted a lot of power. He went to the table where the score of the symphony was lying and tore up the title page. Beethoven stayed in Vienna that year, working hard at an opera and giving piano lessons to Josephine von Brunsvik to whom he wrote passionate letters. She was a young widow with four children. It is impossible to know quite what her feelings were for Beethoven, but socially she belonged in higher society and probably thought that a wild musician was not a suitable husband. In the end she married a Baron, but this marriage, like her first one, was not happy either.