Word: beethoven
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Always out of pocket and always complaining, like Beethoven, of his ill health (he had "overworked" his brain, he said, during a brief stint on the old New York Tribune and never recovered), Thayer labored for 40 years correcting dates, altering anecdotes and filling in the vast gaps in the Beethoven chronology. Because he could not find an English publisher, the Life came out, volume by volume, in German; by the time it appeared in English in 1920, it had long been regarded by scholars as a classic and its author had been dead for 23 years. Though long...
...Thayer who, by scrupulous study of the sketchbooks, revealed the slow and strangely tentative manner in which Beethoven composed, starting with ideas so trivial they look like a student's and rewriting virtually each bar a dozen times. Thayer's study of Beethoven's correspondence disproved not only the composer's supposed grand love affair with the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi but also alliances with many of the ladies with whom the sentimental 19th century liked to link his name. Factually, Thayer was rarely wrong (although he assumed the Beethoven family had come from Holland, whereas later...
Ungovernable Temper. It was the character of Beethoven that most fascinated Thayer, however, and he left a portrait of the man that every biographer, with varying degrees of embarrassment, has had to reckon with since. Thayer's Beethoven is a man of atrocious manners, immense ego and ungovernable temper who at one time or another turned on virtually every one of his friends and alienated most of the musicians of Vienna. His idea of a joke was to dump a bowl of gravy on a waiter who had brought him the wrong dish...
...self-righteous moralist who could denounce his brother Johann's wife as "an infamous strumpet" though he himself, says Thayer primly, "did not always escape the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity." What Thayer meant, as he later explained in correspondence, was that Beethoven had contracted syphilis, probably in the course of certain "conquests" during his early years in Vienna, and that his deafness may have resulted from...
...generation after Thayer's death, at 80, in 1897, British Critic Ernest Newman set the fashion in psychological evaluation of Beethoven by concluding that he suffered from "morbid sex obsessions" because of his troubles with syphilis. Alexander Wheelock Thayer belonged to a gentler, less analytic age. All he could finally conclude about the man he had spent his life studying was that, take him all in all, his was "a very human nature, one which, if it showed extraordinary strengths, exhibited also extraordinary weaknesses...