B. Marx supplying the necessary authorities
upon points in musical science. As for any original research, that is
out of the question. Why stop to verify a fact, to decide a disputed
point, to search out new matter? The market waits,--the publisher
presses,--so, hurry-skurry, away we go,--and the book is done!
Seriously, such a book, from one with such opportunities at command, is
a disgrace to the institution in which its author occupies the station
of Professor.
When Schindler wrote, Johann van Beethoven, the brother, and Carl van
Beethoven, the nephew, were still alive, and feelings of delicacy led
him to do little more than hint at those domestic and family relations
and sorrows which for several years rendered the great composer much of
the time unfit for labor, and which at last brought him to the grave.
When Marx wrote, all had passed away, who could be wounded by a plain
statement of the facts in the case. Until we have such a statement,
none but he who has gone through the labor of studying the original
authorities, as they exist in Berlin, can know the real greatness,
perhaps also the weaknesses, of Beethoven in those last years. None can
know how his heart was torn,--how he poured out, concentrated all the
love of his great heart upon his adopted son, but to learn "how sharper
than the serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.
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