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September 30, 1952. BEETHOVEN AND HIS NEPHEW. Richard and Editha Sterba.
Illustrious people have created around them an aura of greatness and idealism which removes them from the realm of ordinary human beings. While they are alive, and especially after death, they are seen through a haze of hero worship, and the shadows of what would ordinarily be considered intolerable behavior are glossed over and obscured. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, indicates that there is a need which impels the ordinary man to view these people so. It is with the idea of examining the man behind the ideal that Richard and Editha Sterba studied the literature, the letters and the stories about Ludwig von Beethoven.
Born of a severe, alcoholic, musical father and a quiet, disillusioned, unevenly tempered mother, who died of tuberculosis when the boy was seventeen,