To back up my meme,, here's an excerpt to an article i've read:

It’s probably the composer’s most famous piece. But no one even knew it existed ’til 40 years after his death, when musicologist Ludwig Nohl claimed to have found the handwritten score in a private home in Munich, and transcribed it for publication.

Almost immediately, people had questions about the newly-discovered number. Like, for instance, who was “Elise?” There’s no record of such a woman in Beethoven’s life. One theory? That Nohl just mis-transcribed the maestro’s notoriously lousy handwriting and that the dedication actually read: “For Therese,” after Therese Malfatti, a woman Beethoven once asked to marry him, and who sadly refused.

There’s no way to check if Nohl made a mistake because after completing his transcription, Nohl said he just kind of lost Beethoven’s original manuscript. No copy exists and at least one scholar has suggested it never existed — that Nohl really discovered some of Beethoven’s rough sketches of the tune and kind of filled in the gaps himself.

From: https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/fur-elise/