Word: thayer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...THAYER'S LIFE OF BEETHOVEN edited by Elliot Forbes. 1 volumes, 1,136 pages. Princeton...
...leaving none for the day-by-day business of living. The human Beethoven could not add, could not learn the rules of grammar, and could not master his emotions. For a time, his biographers were able to ignore these facts. But in 1866 the first volume of Alexander Wheelock Thayer's great Life appeared, and Beethoven biography has not been the same since...
...Ounce of Accuracy. Thayer was no debunker, but he was a scrupulous researcher after the truth. Until he wrote his Life, Beethoven biography had been a tissue of romantic fables and errors in "almost ludicrous contrast," as Thayer put it, to the facts of the composer's life. Thayer decided to set the record straight while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and the effort occupied him for the rest of his life. On the theory that "an ounce of historical accuracy is worth a pound of rhetorical nourish," he went abroad in 1849 and roamed...
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...