ABSTRACT
Several much-admired biographies offer provocative psychological interpretations of what are said to have been the difficult and problematical relations between Joseph Haydn and Ludwig Beethoven. Giuseppe Carpani's personal acquaintance with Haydn seems to be documented only by his own accounts of it, and perhaps also by his having made the Italian translation of the libretto of the Creation, "at the express order of the Empress," as Georg August Griesinger wrote to Gottfried Hartel. More to the point is that only a modest proportion of the incidents could have been witnessed by those reporting on them. Carpani and Adolf Bernhard Marx expressly designate their reports as hearsay or "tradition"; the same is true of Wegeler Ries's account of Haydn's never having written a string quintet. Anton Schindler states falsely that Haydn and Beethoven never got along after 1793, and that Johann Baptist Schenk continued to help Beethoven after he had moved on to Johann Georg Albrechtsberger.
