Note 10 — Chapter I
Henry Edward Krehbiel translation
Apparently in reply to a question put by Beethoven an unidentified hand writes: “Poor stuff,—empty—totally ineffective—your theme was in bad hands; with much monotony he made 15 or 20 variations and put a cadenza (fermate) in every one, you may imagine what we had to endure—he has fallen off greatly and looks too old to entertain with his acrobatics on the violin.”
Thayer’s industry in the gathering and ordering of material for this biography, let it be remarked here in grateful tribute, is illustrated in the fact that he made practically a complete transcript of the Conversation Books, laboriously deciphering the frequently hieroglyphic scrawls, and compiled a mass of supplementary material for the purpose of fixing the chronological order of the conversations. The dates of all concerts and other public events alluded to were established by the examination of newspapers and other contemporaneous records and the utility of the biographical material greatly enhanced.