Volume 22, Number 9 · May 29, 1975
Knock, Knock. Who's There?
By Alan Tyson
The Interior Beethoven: A Biography of the Music
by Irving Kolodin
Knopf, 357 pp., $15.00
'An ounce of historical accuracy is worth a pound of rhetorical flourish.' These are the words, and they go some way to defining the work, of Alexander Wheelock Thayer, the classic biographer of Beethoven. Few other writers on the composer appear to have formed so austere a view of their duties. The earliest accounts of Beethoven were scarcely more than strings of anecdotes compiled by people who had known him (Seyfried, Wegeler, Ries); they soon gave place to more ambitious attempts to characterize the man and to ruminate philosophically on the music (Lenz, A. B. Marx, Nohl). And somewhere between those two groups came the egregious Anton Schindler. He had not only known Beethoven but had served as his factotum for a time in the 1820s, a fact we are never allowed to forget. But he also had innumerable axes to grind, so that what might have been a peculiarly intimate portrait became distorted through self-importance, malice, and a desire to save 'our master' (Schindler's habitual term) from criticism of any kind, with the result that his production is only of limited value to us today.
Review, 2062 words
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