Alexander Wheelock Thayer鈥檚 Life of Beethoven has long been regarded as the classic biography of Beethoven. To gather the necessary materials, he went to Europe; there, he spent most of his life seeking out those persons still alive who had known Beethoven and studying the sources that were available. His biography succeeded in clearing away the romantic fiction that was then, in the 1870s, current and gave for the first time a full account of the composer鈥檚 life that was based on reliable, historical, method.
Elliot Forbes (1917–2006) was the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music Emeritus at Harvard University, renowned as a Beethoven scholar.
"A model of objective biography, one that is amazingly modern and as valuable today as when it was written. . . . Thayer's Life remains the definitive biography."鈥�The New York Times
“A model of objective biography, one that is amazingly modern and as valuable today as when it was written. . . . Thayer’s Life remains the definitive biography.”—New York Times
“This Life is one of the great monuments of biography, documented to the hilt and expressing in every page Thayer’s motto, ‘An ounce of historical accuracy is worth a pound of rhetorical flourish.’”—The New Yorker
“[Forbes’s] labors . . . give a new life and a new validity to this classic biography.”—Times Literary Supplement
“In the whole range of biographical literature there are few works, musical or otherwise, that rank in fame, exhaustiveness, and universal acceptance with Thayer’s Life of Beethoven.”—Los Angeles Times
