Anton Felix Schindler

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Anton Felix Schindler (1795-1864) was an associate and early biographer of Ludwig van Beethoven. His Life of Beethoven was first published in 1840 and, in its subsequently expanded form (1860), had a great deal of influence on later Beethoven biography.

However, later research essentially demolished Schindler's reliability, due to his demonstrated falsifications of such things as Beethoven's Conversation Books (into which he inserted many spurious entries after Beethoven's death) and his exaggeration of his period of close association with the composer. It was the inconsistencies of Schindler's account that lead Alexander Wheelock Thayer to commence research for his pioneering biography in the 1850s. The Beethoven Compendium (1991) goes so far as to say that Schindler's "propensity for inaccuracy and fabrication was so great that virtually nothing he has recorded can be relied on unless it is supported by other evidence..." (Beethoven Compendium, p. 52). Unfortunately, as Maynard Solomon's 1998 biography of Beethoven points out, many scholars accepted Schindler's testimony as a basis for interpreting numerous aspects of the composer's life and music before the problem was fully realized, so that "It will not be an easy task to separate [Schindler's] facts from his fictions" (Solomon, p. XII).

In the revised 1998 edition of this biography, Solomon took further steps than in his first edition to remove interpretations based on Schindler from his account, except where Schindler's claims were corroborated by other sources (Solomon, p. XVIII). These efforts will likely need to be emulated by future Beethoven scholars in order to clear the record of inaccuracies spawned by Schindler's falsehoods, which have occasionally attached themselves not only to Beethoven's life but also to his music. A case in point is the subtitle of the Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31 no. 2, which is sometimes nicknamed "The Tempest" because, according to Schindler, Beethoven claimed the explanation for the music could be found in Shakespeare's The Tempest. According to The Beethoven Compendium, Schindler's assertion on this matter is very unlikely to be true (Beethoven Compendium, p. 149).

[edit] References

• Barry Cooper, gen. ed., The Beethoven Compendium, Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Press, 1991, ISBN 0-681-07558-9.
• Maynard Solomon, Beethoven, 2nd rev. ed., NY: Schirmer, 1998, ISBN 0-8256-7268-6.