The Emergence of Beethoven Biography

IN 1838 THE PUBLICATION of Wegeler and Ries's Biographische Notizen opened up the world of Beethoven biography and commentary. It spurred others to plan their own entries into the field, whether they framed their work as essays, personal reminiscences, or longer and more ambitious accounts of the composer's life and works. In this newly competitive atmosphere Anton Schindler needed no encouragement, and he characteristically puffed his own importance by denigrating Ferdinand Ries as a trustworthy writer on Beethoven, an attitude which Ries reciprocated.

By about 1840, the image of Beethoven as a central cultural figure was already established, not only in Germany but across Europe and in America, and biographical and critical commentaries began to proliferate. It is hardly surprising that the two dimensions were often intertwined, a feature that has continued down to our own time, of course in successively changing contexts. The more rigorous side of the critical literature developed in the growing discipline of musical analysis, which tended to separate itself off from biography and, depending on the analyst, from criticism, a separation that began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continues to prevail.

A very few mid-19th-century Beethoven biographers, above all Thayer, rigorously pursued historical and biographical issues, while others, notably Wilhelm von Lenz and Adolph Bernhard Marx, focused mainly on the works. Lenz and Marx included some biographical material in their published works but neither one controlled the facts at Thayer's level, as he did not hesitate to point out in his reviews. In 1840 Anton Schindler took the stage as the most self-promoting of all current biographers. His Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven was published in that year, followed in 1842 by his Beethoven in Paris and by later editions of his biography in 1845 and 1860. It continued to influence later biographers for many decades, though not without occasional criticisms. Even as late as 1966, when the first modern English translations of Schindler appeared, edited and annotated by the painstaking Beethoven scholar, Donald MacArdle, neither he nor anyone thought to question Schindler's claim to have been a close confidante of Beethoven's for many years.