Lives of Celebrated MusiciansExcerpt from Lives of Celebrated Musicians The biography of great artists is one of the most important branches of the literature of Art. A knowledge of their lives and fortunes is interesting to those who regard their works with delight and admiration; and much light is thrown upon their genius and character as artists, by the circumstances of their personal history, and an observation of their dispositions, habits, and character as men. There is no musician whose biography would be more interesting under the one of these points of view, and more instructive under the other, than the illustrious Beethoven. But an account of his life yet remains a desideratum in musical literature. Till within a very recent period, all that was known of him personally was contained in the bald German pamphlet of Schlosser, and the interesting, but excessively slight, sketch by the Chevalier Seyfried, prefixed to a posthumous work, entitled 'Beethoven's Studien in Generalbasse,' or Studies in Thoroughbass, Counterpoint, and the Theory of Composition, published at Vienna in 1832. This publication, we must observe in passing, considered as a book of instruction by Beethoven, would do no honour to his memory; but in truth these 'Studies' were a parcel of his juvenile exercises when he was studying under Albrechtsberger, found, along with a great deal of other rubbish, among his papers, after his death, and vamped up and published by the Vienna music-seller who bought up all the manuscripts he had left, as a trading speculation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. |
