Beethoven's Lives: The Biographical Tradition by Lewis Lockwood (review)

For more than fifty years, the indefatigable Lewis Lockwood, professor emeritus at Harvard University, has authored a multitude of distinguished books, essays, reviews, and scholarly editions on the works and the life of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Three decades ago, in his Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; reviewed by the present author in Notes 50, no. 2 [December 1993]: 571–73), Lockwood collected two decades of original insights into what we can learn from studying Beethoven's sketches and autograph scores. Lockwood's pioneering work on this topic uncovered mysteries of Beethoven's creativity undetected by even the most penetrating music analysis and inspired more than a few dissertations, including this reviewer's.

To toast the new millennium, Lock-wood wrote his own comprehensive Beethoven biography, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), with a subtitle that called attention to the author's priorities, as the adage "Ars longa, vita brevis" was realized in print. Three more books on the symphonies and string quartets followed before Lockwood's Beethoven's Lives: The Biographical Tradition arrived in 2020 to celebrate Beethoven's 250th birthday. Lockwood's Lives begins with Beethoven's death and the poet Franz Grillparzer's prescient funeral oration in 1827, delivered to an estimated twenty thousand Viennese mourners by the actor Heinrich Anschütz, and continues to the present day. A short review cannot do justice to the surprisingly large scope of this concise, insightful, and highly readable historical and critical handbook on Beethoven's biographies and their authors. But I will try.

In the first of seven chapters, "The Earliest Biographers," Lockwood singles out Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven (Koblenz: K. Bädeker, 1838), coauthored by Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, a book that serves "as a corrective to the other attempts at biography that had surfaced from 1827 on" (p. 10). The Notizen (Notes) was a collection of reminiscences from two eyewitnesses with close contacts to Beethoven during three phases of his lifetime (Wegeler during 1794–96 and Ries during 1801–5 and 1808–9). For Lockwood, Wegeler–Ries is the "first classic in the literature of Beethoven biography" (p. 9).

Over the next two chapters, Lock-wood focuses on two biographies (among many others) that have continued to exert a significant influence on the numerous Beethoven lives that followed. The first was by Anton Schindler, who claimed to have known Beethoven well as early as 1816, but whose contact was in fact limited to two periods in which he served as an unpaid assistant between September 1822 and the end of May 1824 and during the composer's final months from December 1826 until his death the following March 26. As with the reminiscences of Wegeler and Ries, the first edition of Schindler's biography, which arrived in 1840 (revised and expanded for a third edition in 1860), possessed the potential to offer invaluable eyewitness accounts that could form the basis for a first comprehensive life of Beethoven. Unfortunately, the scholarly world would learn in the 1970s that, in contrast to Wegeler and Ries, Schindler was an unreliable narrator who forged at least 120 entries in the first six of Beethoven's conversation books alone (February 1818 to January 1820). Lockwood rightly cautions readers "to approach his [Schindler's] testimony concerning Beethoven with extreme caution when there is no corroboration from other sources" (p. 30) but refrains from offering specific examples, either of Schindler's tampering, or as Theodore Albrecht demonstrates, where the forgeries do corroborate reliable evidence supplied elsewhere. Despite this omission, Lock-wood is correct in noting the "remarkable feature of Beethoven biography," namely "that one of its founding fathers should turn out to have been an unscrupulous forger of documents whose work nevertheless remained influential for more than a century after his biography first appeared in print" (p. 31).

The great...