If for no other reasons than because of the long time and
monumental patience expended upon its preparation, the vicissitudes
through which it has passed and the varied and arduous labors
bestowed upon it by the author and his editors, the history of
Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven deserves to be set
forth as an introduction to this work. His work it is, and his
monument, though others have labored long and painstakingly upon
it. There has been no considerable time since the middle of the
last century when it has not occupied the minds of the author and
those who have been associated with him in its creation. Between
the conception of its plan and its execution there lies a period of
more than two generations. Four men have labored zealously and
affectionately upon its pages, and the fruits of more than four
score men, stimulated to investigation by the first revelations
made by the author, have been conserved in the ultimate form of the
biography. It was seventeen years after Mr. Thayer entered upon
what proved to be his life-task before he gave the first volume to
the world—and then in a foreign tongue; it was thirteen more before
the third volume came from the press. This volume, moreover, left
the work unfinished, and thirty-two years more had to elapse before
it was completed. When this was done the patient and
self-sacrificing investigator was dead; he did not live to finish
it himself nor to see it finished by his faithful collaborator of
many years, Dr. Deiters; neither did he live to look upon a single
printed page in the language in which he had written that portion
of the work published in his lifetime. It was left for another hand
to prepare the English edition of an American writer’s history of
Germany’s greatest tone-poet, and to write its concluding chapters,
as he believes, in the spirit of the original author.
Under these circumstances there can be no vainglory in
asserting that the appearance of this edition of Thayer’s Life of
Beethoven deserves to be set down as a significant occurrence in
musical history. In it is told for the first time in the language
of the great biographer the true story of the man Beethoven—his
history stripped of the silly sentimental romance with which early
writers and their later imitators and copyists invested it so
thickly that the real humanity, the humanliness, of the composer
has never been presented to the world. In this biography there
appears the veritable Beethoven set down in his true environment of
men and things—the man as he actually was, the man as he himself,
like Cromwell, asked to be shown for the information of posterity.
It is doubtful if any other great man’s history has been so
encrusted with fiction as Beethoven’s. Except Thayer’s, no
biography of him has been written which presents him in his true
light. The majority of the books which have been written of late
years repeat many of the errors and falsehoods made current in the
first books which were written about him. A great many of these
errors and falsehoods are in the account of the composer’s last
sickness and death, and were either inventions or exaggerations
designed by their utterers to add pathos to a narrative which in
unadorned truth is a hundredfold more pathetic than any tale of
fiction could possibly be. Other errors have concealed the truth in
the story of Beethoven’s guardianship of his nephew, his relations
with his brothers, the origin and nature of his fatal illness, his
dealings with his publishers and patrons, the generous attempt of
the Philharmonic Society of London to extend help to him when upon
his deathbed.
In many details the story of Beethoven’s life as told here
will be new to English and American readers; in a few cases the
details will be new to the world, for the English edition of
Thayer’s biography is not a translation of the German work but a
presentation of the original manuscript, so far as the discoveries
made after the writing did not mar its integrity, supplemented by
the knowledge acquired since the publication of the first German
edition, and placed at the service of the present editor by the
German revisers of the second edition. The editor of this English
edition was not only in communication with Mr. Thayer during the
last ten years of his life, but was also associated to some extent
with his continuator and translator, Dr. Deiters. Not only the
fruits of the labors of the German editors but the original
manuscript of Thayer and the mass of material which he accumulated
came into the hands of this writer, and they form the foundation on
which the English “Thayer’s Beethoven” rests. The work is a vastly
different one from that which Thayer dreamed of when he first
conceived the idea of bringing order and consistency into the
fragmentary and highly colored accounts of the composer’s life upon
which he fed his mind and fancy as a student at college; but it is,
even in that part of the story which he did not write, true to the
conception of what Beethoven’s biography should be. Knowledge of
the composer’s life has greatly increased since the time when
Thayer set out upon his task. The first publication of some of the
results of his investigations in his “Chronologisches Verzeichniss”
in 1865, and the first volume of the biography which appeared a
year later, stirred the critical historians into activity
throughout Europe. For them he had opened up a hundred avenues of
research, pointed out a hundred subjects for special study. At once
collectors of autographs brought forth their treasures, old men
opened up the books of their memories, librarians gave eager
searchers access to their shelves, churches produced their
archives, and hieroglyphic sketches which had been scattered all
over Europe were deciphered by scholars and yielded up
chronological information of inestimable value. To all these
activities Thayer had pointed the way, and thus a great mass of
facts was added to the already great mass which Thayer had
accumulated. Nor did Thayer’s labors in the field end with the
first publication of his volumes. So long as he lived he gathered,
ordered and sifted the new material which came under his
observation and prepared it for incorporation into later editions
and later volumes. After he was dead his editors continued the
work.
Alexander Wheelock Thayer was born in South Natick,
Massachusetts, on October 22nd, 1817, and received a liberal
education at Harvard College, whence he was graduated in 1843. He
probably felt that he was cut out for a literary career, for his
first work after graduation was done in the library of
hisAlma Mater. There interest in the life
of Beethoven took hold of him. With the plan in his mind of writing
an account of that life on the basis of Schindler’s biography as
paraphrased by Moscheles, and bringing its statements and those
contained in the “Biographische Notizen” of Wegeler and Ries and a
few English accounts into harmony, he went to Europe in 1849 and
spent two years in making researches in Bonn, Berlin, Prague and
Vienna. He then returned to America and in 1852 became attached to
the editorial staff of “The New York Tribune.” It was in a double
sense an attachment; illness compelled him to abandon journalism
and sever his connection with the newspaper within two years, but
he never gave up his interest in it. He read it until the day of
his death, and his acquaintance with the member of the Tribune’s
staff who was destined to have a part in the completion of his
lifework began when, a little more than a generation after he had
gone to Europe for the second time, he opened a correspondence with
him on a topic suggested by one of this writer’s criticisms. In
1854 he went to Europe again, still fired with the ambition to rid
the life-history of Beethoven of the defects which marred it as
told in the current books. Schindler had sold
thememorabilia which he had received from
Beethoven and Beethoven’s friend Stephan von Breuning to the
Prussian Government, and the precious documents were safely housed
in the Royal Library at Berlin. It was probably in studying them
that Thayer realized fully that it was necessary to do more than
rectify and harmonize current accounts of Beethoven’s life if it
were correctly to be told. He had already unearthed much precious
ore at Bonn, but he lacked the money which alone would enable him
to do the long and large work which now loomed before him. In 1856
he again came back to America and sought employment, finding it
this time in South Orange, New Jersey, where Lowell Mason employed
him to catalogue his musical library. Meanwhile Dr. Mason had
become interested in his great project, and Mrs. Mehetabel Adams,
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, also. Together they provided the funds
which enabled him again to go to Europe, where he now took up a
permanent residence. At first he spent his time in
research-travels, visiting Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf (where
he found material of great value in the archives of the old
Electoral Courts of Bonn and Cologne), Frankfort, Paris, Linz,
Graz, Salzburg, London and Vienna. To support himself he took a
small post in the Legation of the United States at Vienna, but
exchanged this after a space for the U. S. Consulship at Trieste,
to which office he was appointed by President Lincoln on the
recommendation of Senator Sumner. In Trieste he remained till his
death, although out of office after October 1st, 1882. To Sir
George Grove he wrote under date June 1st, 1895: “I was compelled
to resign my office because of utter inability longer to continue
Beethoven work and official labor together.” From Trieste, when his
duties permitted, he went out on occasional exploring tours, and
there he weighed his accumulations of evidence and wrote his
volumes.
In his travels Thayer visited every person of importance then
living who had been in any way associated with Beethoven or had
personal recollection of him—Schindler, the composer’s factotum and
biographer; Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in whose arms he died; Caroline
van Beethoven, widow of Nephew Karl; Charles Neate and Cipriani
Potter, the English musicians who had been his pupils; Sir George
Smart, who had visited him to learn the proper interpretation of
the Ninth Symphony; Moscheles, who had been a professional
associate in Vienna; Otto Jahn, who had undertaken a like task with
his own, but abandoned it and turned over his gathered material to
him; Mähler, an artist who had painted Beethoven’s portrait;
Gerhard von Breuning, son of Beethoven’s most intimate friend, who
as a lad of fourteen had been a cheery companion of the great man
when he lay upon his fatal bed of sickness;—with all these and many
others he talked, carefully recording their testimony in his
note-books and piling up information with which to test the
correctness of traditions and printed accounts and to amplify the
veracious story of Beethoven’s life. His industry, zeal, keen power
of analysis, candor and fairmindedness won the confidence and help
of all with whom he came in contact except the literary charlatans
whose romances he was bent on destroying in the interest of the
verities of history. The Royal Library at Berlin sent the books in
which many of Beethoven’s visitors had written down their part of
the conversations which the composer could not hear, to him at
Trieste so that he might transcribe and study them at his
leisure.
In 1865, Thayer was ready with the manuscript for Volume I of
the work, which contained a sketch of the Courts of the Electors of
Cologne at Cologne and Bonn for over a century, told of the music
cultivated at them and recorded the ancestry of Beethoven so far as
it had been discovered. It also carried the history of the composer
down to the year 1796. In Bonn, Thayer had made the acquaintance of
Dr. Hermann Deiters, Court Councillor and enthusiastic musical
littérateur, and to him he confided the task of editing and
revising his manuscript and translating it into German. The reason
which Thayer gave for not at once publishing his work in English
was that he was unable to oversee the printing in his native land,
where, moreover, it was not the custom to publish such works
serially. He urged upon his collaborator that he practise
literalness of translation in respect of his own utterances, but
gave him full liberty to proceed according to his judgment in the
presentation of documentary evidence. All of the material in the
volume except the draughts from Wegeler, Ries and Schindler, with
which he was frequently in conflict, was original discovery, the
result of the labors begun in Bonn in 1849. His principles he set
forth in these words: “I fight for no theories, and cherish no
prejudices; my sole point of view is the truth.... I have resisted
the temptation to discuss the character of his (Beethoven’s) works
and to make such a discussion the foundation of historical
speculation, preferring to leave such matters to those who have a
greater predilection for them. It appears to me that Beethoven
the composeris amply known through his
works and in this assumption the long and wearisome labors of so
many years were devoted to Beethoven
theman.” The plan to publish his work in
German enabled Thayer to turn over all his documentary evidence to
Deiters in its original shape, a circumstance which saved him great
labor, but left it for his American editor and continuator. The
first German volume appeared in 1866; its stimulative effect upon
musical Europe has been indicated. Volume II came from the press in
1872, Volume III in 1879, both translated and annotated by Deiters.
They brought the story of Beethoven’s life down to the end of the
year 1816, leaving a little more than a decade still to be
discussed.
The health of Thayer had never been robust, and the long and
unintermittent application to the work of gathering and weighing
evidence had greatly taxed his brain. He became subject to severe
headaches and after the appearance of the third volume he found it
impossible to apply himself for even a short time to work upon the
biography. In July, 1890, he wrote a letter to Sir George Grove
which the latter forwarded to this writer. In it he tells in words
of pathetic gratitude of the unexpected honors showered upon him at
Bonn when at the invitation of the Beethoven-Haus Verein he
attended the exhibition and festival given in Beethoven’s
birthplace a short time before. Then he proceeds: “Of course the
great question was on the lips of all: When will the fourth volume
appear? I could only say: When the condition of my head allows it.
No one could see or have from my general appearance the least
suspicion that I was not in mental equal to my physical vigor. In
fact, the extreme excitement of these three weeks took off for the
time twenty years of my age and made me young again; but afterwards
in Hamburg and in Berlin the reaction came. Spite of the delightful
musical parties at Joachim’s, Hausmann’s, Mendelssohn’s ... my head
broke down more and more, and since my return hither, July 3rd, has
as yet shown small signs of recuperation. The extreme importance of
working out my fourth volume is more than ever impressed upon my
mind and weighs upon me like an incubus. But as yet it is still
utterly impossible for me to really work. Of course I only live for
that great purpose and do not despair. My general health is such
that I think the brain must in time recover something of its vigor
and power of labor. What astonishes me and almost creates envy is
to see this wonderful power of labor as exemplified by you and my
neighbor, Burton. But from boyhood I have had head troubles, and
what I went through with for thirty years in supporting myself and
working on Beethoven is not to be described and excites my wonder
that I did not succumb. Well, I will not yet despair.” Thayer’s
mind, active enough in some things, refused to occupy itself with
the Beethoven material; it needed distraction, and to give it that
he turned to literary work of another character. He wrote a book
against the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s works; another on
the Hebrews in Egypt and their Exodus (which Mr. E. S. Willcox, a
friend of many years, published at his request in Peoria,
Illinois). He also wrote essays and children’s tales. Such writing
he could do and also attend to his consular duties; but an hour or
two of thought devoted to Beethoven, as he said in a letter to the
present writer, brought on a racking headache and unfitted him for
labor of any kind.
Meanwhile year after year passed by and the final volume of
the biography was no nearer its completion than in 1880. In fact,
beyond the selection and ordination of its material, it was
scarcely begun. His friends and the lovers of Beethoven the world
over grew seriously concerned at the prospect that it would never
be completed. Sharing in this concern, the editor of the present
edition developed a plan which he thought would enable Thayer to
complete the work notwithstanding the disabilities under which he
was laboring. He asked the coöperation of Novello, Ewer & Co.,
of London, and got them to promise to send a capable person to
Trieste to act as a sort of literary secretary to Thayer. It was
thought that, having all the material for the concluding volume on
hand chronologically arranged, he might talk it over with the
secretary, but without giving care to the manner of literary
presentation. The secretary was then to give the material a proper
setting and submit it to Thayer for leisurely revision. Very
hopefully, and with feelings of deep gratitude to his friends, the
English publishers, the American editor submitted his plan; but
Thayer would have none of it. Though unable to work upon the
biography for an hour continuously, he yet clung to the notion that
some day he would not only finish it but also rewrite the whole for
English and American readers. From one of the letters placed at my
disposal by Sir George Grove, it appears that subsequently (in
1892) there was some correspondence between an English publisher
and Mr. Thayer touching an English edition. The letter was written
to Sir George on June 1st, 1895. In it he says: “I then hoped to be
able to revise and prepare it (the Beethoven MS.) for publication
myself, and was able to begin the labor and arrange with a
typewriting woman to make the clean copy. How sadly I failed I
wrote you. Since that time the subject has not been renewed between
us. I am now compelled to relinquish all hope of ever being able to
do the work. There are two great difficulties to be overcome: the
one is that all letters and citations are in the original German as
they were sent to Dr. Deiters; the other, there is much to be
condensed, as I always intended should be for this reason: From the
very first chapter to the end of Vol. III, I am continually in
conflict with all previous writers and was compelled, therefore, to
show in my text that I was right by so using my materials that the
reader should be taken along step by step and compelled to see the
truth for himself. Had all my arguments been given in notes nine
readers out of ten would hardly have read them, and I should have
been involved in numberless and endless controversies. Now the case
is changed. A. W. T’s novelties are now, with few if any
exceptions, accepted as facts and can, in the English edition, be
used as such. Besides this, there is much new matter to be inserted
and some corrections to be made from the appendices of the three
German volumes. The prospect now is that I may be able to do some
of this work, or, at all events, go through my MS. page by page and
do much to facilitate its preparation for publication in English. I
have no expectation of ever receiving any pecuniary recompense for
my 40 years of labor, for my many years of poverty arising from the
costs of my extensive researches, for my—but enough of this also.”
In explanation of the final sentence in this letter it may be added
that Thayer told the present writer that he had never received a
penny from his publisher for the three German volumes; nothing
more, in fact, than a few books which he had ordered and for which
the publisher made no charge.
Thus matters rested when Thayer died on July 15th, 1897. The
thought that the fruits of his labor and great sacrifices should be
lost to the world even in part was intolerable. Dr. Deiters, with
undiminished zeal and enthusiasm, announced his willingness to
revise the three published volumes for a second edition and write
the concluding volume. Meanwhile all of Thayer’s papers had been
sent to Mrs. Jabez Fox of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author’s
niece and one of his heirs. There was a large mass of material, and
it became necessary to sift it in order that all that was needful
for the work of revision and completion might be placed in the
hands of Dr. Deiters. This work was done, at Mrs. Fox’s request, by
the present writer, who, also at Mrs. Fox’s request, undertook the
task of preparing this English edition. Dr. Deiters accomplished
the work of revising Volume I, which was published by Weber, the
original publisher of the German volumes, in 1891. He then decided
that before taking up the revision of Volumes II and III he would
bring the biography to a conclusion. He wrote, not the one volume
which Thayer had hoped would suffice him, but two volumes, the mass
of material bearing on the last decade of Beethoven’s life having
grown so large that it could not conveniently be comprehended in a
single tome, especially since Dr. Deiters had determined to
incorporate critical discussions of the composer’s principal works
in the new edition. The advance sheets of Volume IV were in Dr.
Deiters’s hands when, full of years and honors, he died on May 1st,
1907. Breitkopf and Härtel had meanwhile purchased the German
copyright from Weber, and they chose Dr. Hugo Riemann to complete
the work of revision. Under Dr. Riemann’s supervision Volumes IV
and V were brought out in 1908, and Volumes II and III in
1910-1911.
Not until this had been accomplished could the American
collaborator go systematically to work on his difficult and
voluminous task, for he had determined to use as much as possible
of Thayer’s original manuscript and adhere to Thayer’s original
purpose and that expressed in his letter to Sir George Grove. He
also thought it wise to condense the work so as to bring it within
three volumes and to seek to enhance its readableness in other
ways. To this end he abolished the many appendices which swell the
German volumes, and put their significant portions into the body of
the narrative; he omitted many of the hundreds of foot-notes,
especially the references to the works of the earlier biographers,
believing that the special student would easily find the sources if
he wished to do so, and the general reader would not care to verify
the statements of one who has been accepted as the court of last
resort in all matters of fact pertaining to Beethoven, the man; he
also omitted many letters and presented the substance of others in
his own words for the reason that they can all be consulted in the
special volumes which contain the composer’s correspondence; of the
letters and other documents used in the pages which follow, he made
translations for the sake of accuracy as well as to avoid conflict
with the copyright privileges of the publishers of English
versions. Being as free as the German editors in respect of the
portion of the biography which did not come directly from the pen
of Thayer, the editor of this English edition chose his own method
of presentation touching the story of the last decade of
Beethoven’s life, keeping in view the greater clearness and
rapidity of narrative which, he believed, would result from a
grouping of material different from that followed by the German
editors in their adherence to the strict chronological method
established by Thayer.
A large number of variations from the text of the original
German edition are explained in the body of this work or in
foot-notes. In cases where the German editors were found to be in
disagreement with the English manuscript in matters of opinion
merely, the editor has chosen to let Mr. Thayer’s arguments stand,
though, as a rule, he has noted the adverse opinions of the German
revisers also. A prominent instance of this kind is presented by
the mysterious love-letter found secreted in Beethoven’s desk after
his death. Though a considerable literature has grown up around the
“Immortal Beloved” since Thayer advanced the hypothesis that the
lady was the Countess Therese Brunswick, the question touching her
identity and the dates of the letters is still as much an open one
as it was when Thayer, in his characteristic manner, subjected it
to examination. This editor has, therefore, permitted Thayer not
only to present his case in his own words, but helped him by
bringing his scattered pleadings and briefs into sequence. He has
also outlined in part the discussion which followed the
promulgation of Thayer’s theory, and advanced a few fugitive
reflections of his own. The related incident of Beethoven’s vain
matrimonial project has been put into a different category by new
evidence which came to light while Dr. Riemann was engaged in his
revisory work. It became necessary, therefore, that the date of
that incident be changed from 1807, where Thayer had put it, to
1810. By this important change Beethoven’s relations to Therese
Malfatti were made to take on a more serious attitude than Thayer
was willing to accord them.
In this edition, finally, more importance is attached to the
so-called Fischer Manuscript than Thayer was inclined to give it,
although he, somewhat grudgingly we fear, consented that Dr.
Deiters should print it with critical comments in the Appendix of
his Vol. I. The manuscript, though known to Thayer, had come to the
attention of Dr. Deiters too late for use in the narrative portion
of the volume, though it was thus used in the second edition. The
story of the manuscript, which is now preserved in the museum of
the Beethoven-Haus Verein in Bonn, is a curious one. Its author was
Gottfried Fischer, whose ancestors for four generations had lived
in the house in the Rheingasse which only a few years ago was
still, though mendaciously, pointed out to strangers as the house
in which Beethoven was born. Fischer, who lived till 1864, was born
in the house which formerly stood on the site of the present
building known as No. 934, ten years after Beethoven’s eyes opened
to the light in the Bonngasse. At the time of Fischer’s birth the
Beethoven family occupied a portion of the house and Fischer’s
father and the composer’s father were friends and companions.
There, too, had lived the composer’s grandfather. Gottfried Fischer
had a sister, Cäcilia Fischer, who was born eight years before
Beethoven; she remained unmarried and lived to be 85 years old,
dying on May 23rd, 1845. The festivities attending the unveiling of
the Beethoven monument in 1838 brought many visitors to Bonn and a
natural curiosity concerning the relics of the composer. Inquirers
were referred to the house in the Rheingasse, then supposed to be
the birthplace of the composer, where the Fischers, brother and
sister, still lived. They told their story and were urged by eager
listeners to put it into writing. This Gottfried did the same year,
but, keeping the manuscript in hand, he added to it at intervals
down to the year 1857 at least. He came to attach great value to
his revelations and as time went on embellished his recital with a
mass of notes, many of no value, many consisting of iterations and
reiterations of incidents already recorded, and also with excerpts
from books to which, in his simplicity, he thought that nobody but
himself had access. He was an uneducated man, ignorant even of the
correct use of the German language; it is, therefore, not
surprising that much of his record is utterly worthless; but mixed
with the dross there is much precious metal, especially in the
spinster’s recollection of the composer’s father and grandfather,
for while Gottfried grew senile his sister remained mentally
vigorous to the end. Thayer examined the document and offered to
buy it, but was dissuaded by the seemingly exorbitant price which
the old man set upon it. It was finally purchased for the city’s
archives by the Oberbürgermeister and thus came to the notice of
Dr. Deiters. His use of it has been followed by the present
editor.
