Alexander Wheelock Thayer

• 1. My Sole Point of View

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  Alexander Wheelock Thayer wrote in 1865: "I fight for no theories and cherish no prejudices; my sole point of view is the truth." By that year, Thayer had already spent sixteen years pursuing this ambition across Europe, supporting himself largely through journalism. He was an American, Harvard-trained and working as a librarian, before a troubled biography of Ludwig van Beethoven changed his plans. The existing account of Beethoven's life was riddled with discrepancies he could not ignore. What had gone wrong? And how far would a librarian-turned-journalist have to go to set the record straight? The problems traced back to a single name: Anton Schindler.

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• 2. A Librarian's Reckoning

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  In the winter of 1838-1839, Thayer was teaching at the Westfield School in Dedham, Massachusetts. Teaching would not hold him. He earned a BA and an LLB from Harvard University and later worked as a librarian at Harvard Law School. There he encountered the biography of Beethoven by Anton Schindler. Schindler had served as Beethoven's sometime amanuensis, and his account of the composer had appeared in 1840. Thayer found discrepancies he could not reconcile with other sources. Schindler's reliability would later become the subject of extensive scholarly scrutiny. But Thayer arrived at his doubts early, and they pointed toward only one remedy. He began making plans to sail for Europe and do the research himself.

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• 3. Across the Atlantic

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  In 1849, Thayer arrived in Europe with no institutional support and no guaranteed income. Learning German was the first necessity; the primary sources for Beethoven's life were in that language, and Thayer had to acquire it from nothing. He spent the following years collecting information while financing himself through journalism. The hardships were considerable. An appointment as US Consul in Trieste eventually changed his situation. That post on the Adriatic coast brought stable income and enough time to do the work properly. The biography, when it eventually appeared, would come out not in English but in German.

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• 4. A Life Unfinished

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  Three volumes of Thayer's biography appeared in German between 1866 and 1879. They brought the story of Beethoven's life only as far as 1816. Beethoven had not died until 1827, leaving eleven years still unwritten. Thayer accumulated notes toward the remaining volumes but did not live to complete them. He had been born on the 22nd of October 1817 and died on the 15th of July 1897. The task of completion fell to Thayer's German colleague Hermann Deiters.

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• 5. After Thayer

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  After Deiters's death, Hugo Riemann continued the project, producing volumes four and five in 1907 and 1908 from the notes Thayer had gathered over decades. Those volumes brought the biography to its conclusion, covering Beethoven's life from 1817 to his death in 1827. In 1917, Henry Edward Krehbiel wrote of Thayer: "His industry, zeal, keen power of analysis, candor and fair-mindedness won the confidence of all with whom he came into contact except the literary charlatans whose romances he was bent on destroying in the interest of the verities of history." Krehbiel went on to produce the first English edition of the biography in 1921. His own fourth volume was published posthumously in 1925. The most recent edition was revised and edited by Elliot Forbes. Long after Thayer's death, the biography he had begun was still regarded as a standard work of reference on Beethoven.

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