by George Marek
[Mr. Marek, whose latest book, Beethoven, Biography of a Genius, was published in October by Funk & Wagnalls, is vice president of RCA Records. ]
The U.S. Consul at Trieste devoted nearly fifty years to researching and writing his Life of Beethoven for an American readership-yet the now classic biography appeared only in a German translation during his lifetime.
IN HIS YOUTH he looked like Alexander Hamilton. In his old age, with a long white beard, he resembled Walt Whitman. At all times he spoke, acted, and appeared as what in fact he was: a gentleman from New England.
How did it happen that such a man--born not in Bonn but near Boston, not a musician by training but solely a lover of music, a biographer who came into the world too late ever to have seen or spoken to his subject-wrote the first truly trustworthy biography of Beethoven? How did it happen that this man devoted his entire working life to the production of one book, one so painstakingly produced that it has remained a source to be siphoned by all subsequent biographers? As every admirer of Beethoven knows, the gentleman's name was Alexander Wheelock Thayer. The name alone indicates how far he was removed from any connection with Austria or the Rhineland, how little his background had in common with the Schindlers, the Kalischers, the Schiedermairs, the Frimmels, and the Nottebohms whose sternly Teutonic names stand as the signposts of scholarly Beethoven literature. One wonders what Beethoven himself would have made of "Wheelock "; he could not manage to spell Bridgetower, the name of the violinist for whom he originally wrote the Kreutzer Sonata: "Brishdower" was the nearest he could cone to it.
It is never possible to trace that spark which lights the fire of enthusiasm. What prompted a Colonel G. F. Young, C.B., for instance, to spend all his time compiling the authoritative work on the Medici; and how was it that a young man born of a good family in Putney-on-Thames and destined for a safe career in the church abandoned that career to write the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Perhaps even Edward Gibbon himself could not give us the answer. In Thayer's case we may theorize that his early environment and schooling led him toward European, and especially German, culture which at that time dominated New England thought, and that the Yankee habit of doubting led him to examine the life of a genius who, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had become famous enough to have his portrait encrusted with innumerable legends.
Thayer was born in Natick, Massachusetts, a little village seventeen miles from Boston. The year was 1817. His father, Alexander Thayer, a physician, died when the boy was six years old, and the son was brought up by his mother. There was enough money to assure Alexander junior a good education. He went to Andover and then to Harvard University. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1843 and from the Law School five years after that. To help the family finances, he worked as an assistant in the university library.
German music, German philosophy, and the German literature of the Romantic Movement formed part of Thayer's New England ambience. Emerson, another New Englander and a contemporary of Thayer, was stimulated by the German tradition and was as great an admirer of Goethe as was Emerson's close friend Thomas Carlyle. Thayer became interested in philosophy and in dialectics and joined the Harvard Debating Society. (There exists a record of a topic which Thayer debated: "Which Has Caused the Most Unpleasant Meditation-the Sword or Strong Drink ? ") A cousin of his, Calvin E. Stowe, went to Germany, studied the Prussian system of education, and reported his findings to the Ohio Legislature. Thayer had the opportunity to become acquainted with Beethoven's symphonies through performance: between 1841 and 1847 he could, and no doubt did, hear Boston performances of six of the nine symphonies.
In the Harvard Library he came across Anton Schindler's book on Beethoven, which was first published in 1840. (Schindler was, for some years, Beethoven's companion and man-of-all-work.) The more he pondered the matter, the more he became convinced that Schindler's biography was inadequate and in some respects mendacious. Nor did the other personal recollections and panegyrics penned by Beethoven's admirers convince him. He felt the need for a more judicial approach to the great man. Finally, in 1849, Thayer made his decision. He sailed for Europe. His first stop was Bonn. There he perfected his German and began collecting facts about Beethoven.
He supported himself by various forms of journalistic work, but his money soon gave out and he had to return to America to look for regular employment. He found this on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune. He worked for that newspaper at night and thought about Beethoven during the day. His health broke down from overwork; he never entirely recovered.
After two years Thayer returned to Europe, to Berlin, to study Beethoven's conversation books and the other documents then housed in the Royal Prussian Library, now the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin. Once again his self-imposed task, pursued for long hours within library walls where the lighting was poor and the air stale, proved too much for him.
Once again he had to return to America: his Berlin friends believed that he was going to die. He did suffer a long, severe illness, plagued by maddening headaches; but he recovered, and finally two high-minded friends, Lowell Mason, the composer and musicologist who had employed Thayer to catalogue his music library, and a Mrs. Mehetabel Adams of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became sufficiently interested in Thayer's project to provide the funds which enabled him to return to Europe and to spend the rest of his life researching material in various countries. In later years he did obtain a small post in the United States Legation in Vienna and was afterwards appointed United States Consul at Trieste by President Lincoln. Trieste remained his home until his death, if it can be said that he had a home. He never married. He lived, as did Beethoven, in a modest flat with a housekeeper who took care of him tant bien que mal.
Most of the time he was away hunting; he hunted every scrap of paper connected with Beethoven's life and sought out every man or woman who had known the composer. Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfort, Paris, Linz, Graz, Vienna, Salzburg, London: wherever Beethoven's steps had left an imprint, there was Thayer. He interviewed Schindler, with whom he must have had many a sharp brush because Schindler walked around as a kind of official Beethoven representative, as a keeper of the keys: Schindler was even supposed to have proffered visiting cards upon which were imprinted the words "Pauli de Beethoven" underneath his name. Thayer interviewed Anselm Hüttenbrenner, the friend of Schubert who happened to be present when Beethoven died; Caroline Beethoven, the widow of nephew Karl; the English musicians who had journeyed to Vienna to learn from Beethoven and to persuade him-in vain-to journey to London; men such as Charles Ncate, Cipriani Potter, and that fine conductor and forthright and admirable character, Sir George Smart, who had done much for Beethoven's music in England. He spoke to Ignaz Moscheles, the famous composer and pianist who had been entrusted with the task of writing the piano score of Fidelio; Joseph Mähler, who had painted a number of portraits of the composer; Gerhard von Breuning, who as a boy had brought a little cheer and comfort to Beethoven's sickroom. He also approached some of the women with whom Beethoven had been in love, most of them now grown old and feeble and uncertain of memory. Slowly and carefully he piled up testimony, weighing one man's word against another.
From the first, Thayer's book was intended for English-speaking readers. In an autobiographical sketch, which is preserved in the Beethoven House in Bonn, Thayer tells us that originally he had meant to prepare the book for an American edition.
After seventeen years, only the first volume of the biography was ready, a volume so full of detail that it covered Beethoven's life only to the year 1796, when Beethoven was twenty-six years old and had hardly composed any of the music which makes Beethoven, Beethoven. There now seemed little prospect of publishing the incomplete work in English.
Thayer decided therefore to have the work translated into German. (His reason for this, according to the Krehbiel edition of his Life of Beethoven, 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." This was probably his polite way of saying that no publisher wanted to risk the money required for publication.) In Bonn he had met another scholar, Hermann Deiters, who had edited Otto Jahn's biography of Mozart. Thayer asked Deiters to collaborate and to begin to prepare the German edition. This Deiters agreed to do. We have therefore the curious case of a book written by an American for Americans, published first in a German translation. The first German volume duly appeared in 1866. It was immediately recognized, at least in Germany, as an important work.
Thayer kept on with his labor, the second volume appearing in 1872 and the third in 1879, both translated by Deiters. Still no English edition. Now the story of Beethoven's life had been brought up to the fateful year in which the troubles with his nephew Karl began. But eleven years were still to he covered. Thayer's health worsened. The headaches increased in frequency and in severity. Thayer could do other work, writing which he thought less consequential: a slim volume arguing against the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and a few miscellaneous essays and children's stories.
But, as he himself said, an hour or two devoted to Beethoven brought on a wracking headache and made him unfit for labor of any kind.
The years rolled on without Thayer's being able to finish the task. More and more of the world's scholars and Beethoven enthusiasts learned about the incomplete project, and many were concerned with the possibility that it would never be finished. They were right. Thayer died in 1897 at the age of eighty.
The book was still incomplete. He left the papers containing the facts about Beethoven's last years-which Thayer had unearthed by particularly meticulous research-to Deiters. Deiters first brought out a revision of volume 1 and then undertook the labor of finishing the book from Thayer's notes. Volume 4 was in the hands of the publisher when Deiters died, but even this volume only brought Beethoven's life up to the year 1823. Still lacking were the final four years before his death-eventful and tragic years which saw the first performance of the Ninth Symphony and the composition of the last quartets.
In the meantime, Breitkopf and Härtel had purchased the copyright from the original publisher; they chose Hugo Riemann, another highly knowledgeable and respected scholar. to complete what Deiters had left incomplete. Volumes 4 and 5 were brought out in 1907 and 1908, and revised versions of the earlier volumes under Riemann's editorship appeared somewhat later. These were all still German versions.
The demand for an English version increased.
Who was to undertake it? When Thayer died, his belongings and manuscripts had been shipped to America, to be taken care of by his niece. It was she who asked Henry Edward Krehbiel, the music critic of the New York Tribune, to take charge of the material and prepare the English version. Yet he could not immediately do so because part of the papers had been shipped back to Germany to enable Deiters and Riemann to complete their task.
Eventually the material once again crossed the Atlantic and Krehbiel set about the formidable task of sifting it and translating the text. He had virtually completed his work by 1914 when World War I plus other complications prevented the book from being published. Finally, after the war, the Beethoven Association of New York, composed of high-minded and devoted musicians, insisted that Thayer's magnum opus must be given to the Englishspeaking world for which it was intended. In the season of 1919-20 they organized a series of concerts of Beethoven's chamber music. O. G. Sonneck, the musicologist and editor of the Musical Quarterly, and Harold Bauer, the pianist, were the prime movers of this project. The proceeds of the concerts were to be utilized for underwriting the publication of Thayer's biography. The concerts were highly successful and enough money was raised for the first edition in English to be published by G. Schirmer, Inc., in 1921.
Now a new mystery entered the already fogged fortunes of this book. Thayer's papers were, as I have said, in Krehbiel's possession. When Krehbiel died in 1923, they unaccountably got lost. To this day nobody knows what happened to them. Not only that, but virtually all of Krehbiel's own notes have disappeared. Elliot Forbes, in his introduction to the current edition of Thayer's Life, writes: Unfortunately, the legal files of the estate of the widow, Mrs. Marie Krehbiel, have all been destroyed. Krehbiel's Beethoven library was left to the Beethoven Association in New York upon his death in 1923. When this society disbanded in 1940, its collection of books was left to the New York Public Library.
Neither in the I 25th St. Warehouse, nor in the old Beethoven Room (alas, no more in existence), nor in the basement vaults of the Library have these boxes shown up. All that is left of the papers is a loose-sheet draft of the Thayer-Krehbiel collaboration. consisting of some sheets in Thayer's handwriting, some with Krehbiel's writing pasted over parts or all of them, and the rest in Krehbiel's own characteristic red ink.
The net result of all this is that it is extremely difficult to tell what parts of the biography represent Thayer's own writings and what parts were the contributions by and emendations of his editors Deiters, Riemann, or Krehbiel. Beethoven, as portrayed by Thayer, remains a character in search of four authors.
In 1949 the copyright of the book was assigned to Princeton University. They commissioned Elliot Forbes of Harvard to prepare a new edition of the work, adding facts about Beethoven that had been unearthed over the last thirty years. and correcting the relatively few mistakes that had crept into previous editions. This edition was published in 1964 and it is the one which is now in circulation.
We have before us, then, a highly patched garment, one which has been sewn by several tailors.
Yet the original garment was fashioned of such durable material that it still holds together. Thayer's Life is still considered a classic in its field.
What were the qualities which distinguished Thayer as a biographer? First, his honesty. Thayer had no preconceived notions. He neither defended nor attacked. He ground no axes. He rode no pet theories.
He was not an idolatrous biographer. Though Beethoven was his hero and the polestar of his life, he did not burke a description of his faults. When he went wrong he did so because of insufficient evidence, not because he bent a fact to support a belief. Later research has proved as untenable Thayer's choice of Therese Brunsvik for the woman to whom the famous "Immortal Beloved" letter was addressed.
Yet no scholar after him can assert that he has found the solution to the puzzle in spite of all the detective work. Thayer was far more often right than wrong, and this rightness was due to his passionate drive to find the truth and tell it. There were still enough people around who had known Beethoven, and, though "old men forget," enough of them remembered enough to pile anecdote upon anecdote from which Thayer chose what seemed probable to him. Alexander Wheelock was a doubting Thomas, to whom it was not easy to tell fairy tales. All this is by way of saying that he was indefatigable: if one considers that it was hardly child's play to journey extensively across the frontiers of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century--and surely such journeys were then a lot more expensive than they are today-one marvels at how often Thayer appeared in various locales, pad and pen in hand.
His early training in library work had given him an instinctive feeling as to where to look for facts.
He was remarkably successful in locating the lode in archives and newspaper files.
Perhaps most important, he had great personal charm. He nudged and beguiled and gently persuaded. The New England straightness of his personality, combined with his enthusiasm, gave people the impression that here was someone they could trust. He made many friends who were willing to go to a good deal of trouble to give him what he wanted. And he wanted a lot. "Will that content you ?" ends one long letter from a man who related to him his personal experiences with Beethoven.
Thayer's shortcomings as a biographer were principally two: he was not a sprightly writer. In vain does one look for graphic style or plastic portrayal; in vain does one seek the kind of writing one finds at its most vivid in Boswell's Life of Johnson or to use a lesser example--in the recent Troyat biography of Tolstoy. Francis Hueffer, in an early review of the book (1880), said it was "anything but lively reading." Thayer's Life is largely an orderly storehouse of facts, and therefore more of a reference book than a reading book. But then, as Carlyle said, "a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one." Thayer himself was never satisfied, and had his strength held out he undoubtedly would have recast the work.
His second shortcoming can be traced to his upbringing and environment. He lived in Victorian times and was a "proper Bostonian." When he discusses Beethoven's love life Thayer seems uncomfortable.
The internal evidence suggests more than once that he slid away from the subject and even suppressed certain facts in his possession. This suppression had been particularly noted by Ernest Newman in his book The Unconscious Beethoven (still one of the most perceptive of all the books about the composer). For example, Thayer comments on a statement by Beethoven's friend Franz Wegeler that during the composer's first three years in Vienna he made several conquests which "if not impossible for many an Adonis would still have been difficult." Thayer writes: "Let such matters, even if detail concerning them were now attainable, be forgotten" and then hurries on. He hints that Beethoven "did not always escape the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity," but does not particularize what these penalties were.
The names of two married women might here be given, to whom at a later period Beethoven was warmly attached; names which have hitherto escaped the eyes of literary scavengers, and are therefore here suppressed. Certain of his friends used to joke to him about these ladies, and it is certain that he rather enjoyed their jests even when the insinuations, that his affection was beyond the limit of the Platonic, were somewhat broad; but careful enquiry has failed to elicit any evidence that even in these cases he proved unfaithful to his principles.
[From the Forbes edition] If that was so, why did Thayer not give the names of the two married women? This vagueness or this suppression-if it was suppression-becomes important when one tries to weigh the evidence as to whether Beethoven did or did not suffer from a venereal infection. The first public statement of such a possibility appeared in the original Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The statement is accompanied by a footnote: "This diagnosis, which I owe to the kindness of my friend Dr. Lauder Brunton, is confirmed by the existence of two prescriptions, of which, since the passage in the text was written, I have been told by Mr. Thayer, who heard of them from Dr. Bartolini [sic]." Sir George Grove was a man of high probity and a careful scholar, even though he did misspell Dr. Bertolini's name. (Bertolini was one of Beethoven's physicians for ten years and Thayer knew him.) There can he no doubt that Thayer did tell Grove of these prescriptions. Yet they have not been found, nor does Thayer mention them at any time. To do Thayer justice, it is possible that he felt the evidence was insufficient, and not being entirely convinced of the validity of his data thought it best not to discuss the matter. Still, Thayer's silence seems suspicious. It is all the more regrettable because if we had been told the truth it might have cleared up some equivocal and despairing entries in Beethoven's journals and diaries and could help to elucidate further the composer's character.
Yet, as I have tried to show, Thayer's virtues as a biographer outweigh the defects sufficiently for the book to remain a valid document.
Beyond question it was a labor of love. Two years before he died, Thayer wrote to Sir George Grove: 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 cost of my extensive researches, for my-but enough of this also.
[Quoted from Krehbiel's Introduction] Krchbiel comments: 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.
Yet Thayer did leave a respectable estate. According to an article by Christopher Hatch, The Education of A. W. Thayer [Musical Quarterly, July 1956], he bequeathed thirty thousand dollars to Harvard University, the income from which was to be spent to help indigent students, preferably named Thayer.
This stipulation was not necessary to hand down to posterity the name of Alexander Wheelock Thayer.
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( High Fidelity magazine)
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