Anton Schindler

Anton Felix Schindler (13 June 1795 – 16 January 1864) was an associate, secretary, and early biographer of Ludwig van Beethoven. He was born in Medlov, Moravia, and died in Bockenheim (Frankfurt am Main).

He moved to Vienna in 1813 to study law, and from 1817 to 1822, was a clerk in a law office there. He was a competent violinist, and played in musical ensembles, first meeting Beethoven in 1814. He gave up his law career, becoming in 1822 first violinist at the Theater in der Josefstadt and from 1825, first violinist at the Theater am Kärntnertor. His acquaintance with Beethoven had continued, and from 1822, he lived in the composer's house, as his unpaid secretary.

There was a break in the relationship in 1825, and Karl Holz, a young violinist and friend of Beethoven, became Beethoven's secretary; Schindler managed to make amends with Beethoven and returned in 1826.

After Beethoven's death in 1827, Schindler moved to Budapest where he was a music teacher, returning to Vienna in 1829. In 1831, he moved to Münster where he was a musical director; from 1835 he lived in Aachen, where he was municipal music director until 1840. In 1840, his biography of Beethoven was published in Münster. Later editions appeared in 1845, 1860 and 1871.

In 1841–42 he visited Paris, and met famous musicians of the day.

He possessed a great part of Beethoven's estate, in particular about 400 conversation books (used by people when conversing with Beethoven in his later years). Beethoven's estate, purchased by the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin in 1845, included 136 conversation books, the remainder of which were retained by Schindler; it has been presumed that they were destroyed.

Although as early as the 1850s, the inconsistencies of Schindler's account were clear enough to lead Alexander Wheelock Thayer to commence research for his own pioneering biography, it was a series of musicological articles published since the 1970s that essentially destroyed Schindler's reputation of reliability. It was demonstrated that he falsified entries in Beethoven's Conversation Books (into which he inserted many spurious entries after Beethoven's death in 1827) and that he had exaggerated his period of close association with the composer (his claimed '11 or 12 years' was likely no more than five or six). It was also believed that Schindler burned more than half of the conversation books and countless pages from those which survived. The Beethoven Compendium (Cooper 1991, p. 52) 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 upon unless it is supported by other evidence. More recently, Theodore Albrecht has re-examined the question of Schindler's reliability, and as to his presumed destruction of a huge number of conversation books, concludes that this widespread belief could not be true.

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