Amalie Sebald

Amalie Sebald (24 August 1787 – 4 January 1846) was a German singer and was considered at the beginning of the 20th century to be Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved".

[1] Beethoven met Sebald in the summer of 1811 in the spa resort Teplitz; she had arrived together with the countess Elisa von der Recke.

[2] while Beethoven remained unmarried and five years later told Gianastasio de Rio that he had little hope of winning over the woman he had fallen in love with.

One of her pupils was Lili Parthey, to whom she gave in 1817 a medallion with hair of Queen Luise for her birthday.

[4] The Beethoven scholar Wolfgang Alexander Thomas-San-Galli believed in 1910 to have found in Sebald the addressee of the famous Letter to the Immortal Beloved, a letter which Beethoven had written to an unknown person in the Bohemian spa town Teplitz on July 6–7, 1812.

Amalie Sebald, pastel by Dora Stock (detail)