[Gutenberg 43593] • The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III

This book is an illustrated version of the original The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven by Alexander Wheelock Thayer. “In many details the story of Beethoven’s life as told here will be new to English and American readers; in a few cases the details will be new to the world, for the English edition of Thayer’s biography is not a translation of the German work but a presentation of the original manuscript, so far as the discoveries made after the writing did not mar its integrity, supplemented by the knowledge acquired since the publication of the first German edition, and placed at the service of the present editor by the German revisers of the second edition. The editor of this English edition was not only in communication with Mr. Thayer during the last ten years of his life, but was also associated to some extent with his continuator and translator, Dr. Deiters. Not only the fruits of the labors of the German editors but the original manuscript of Thayer and the mass of material which he accumulated came into the hands of this writer, and they form the foundation on which the English “Thayer’s Beethoven” rests.”