The Woman Who Got the Moonlight by Accident

Countess Julie Guicciardi arrived in Vienna in 1800, and the city noticed. She was young, beautiful enough that society called her "La Bella Guicciardi," and she needed a piano teacher. She got Beethoven.

He fell in love almost immediately. She, by most accounts, did not.

Beethoven had written a Rondo in G for her — a pleasant, warm little piece. But when political obligations forced him to dedicate that rondo to someone else, he needed a substitute. He rummaged through his recent work and landed on a sonata he'd titled Quasi una Fantasia. It was dark, strange, unlike anything he'd written before. He put her name on it and sent it to the publisher.

One imagines Julie received the news with approximately the same enthusiasm she'd shown for his affections.

She married Count Gallenberg, a composer of ballet music, in 1803. They moved to Naples. A decade later, she turned up at the Congress of Vienna as an informal diplomatic emissary for Napoleon's brother-in-law, working the most powerful room in Europe while Metternich and Talleyrand redrew the map. Meanwhile, a poet named Rellstab decided Beethoven's sonata sounded like moonlight on a lake, and the nickname stuck.

The most famous piano dedication in history was a last-minute substitution, named by a man who never met her, for a woman who was busy doing other things.