by the Spanish sculptor and painter Vicente Novarra (1888-1978),
perhaps from the time of his 1912 Monumento a Beethoven y Boceto del mismo
(from the collection of William Meredith)
I am especially grateful to Summer C. Latimer for her work designing this website. Her patience and good humor, as well as her profound artistic sensibility, have been much appreciated.
I would also like to thank Kevin Brown for allowing me to include a section of the website on the three authentic locks of hair that he owns so that the public may have access to what they look like and a brief history. For more information, please see the forthcoming extremely detailed dissertation of Tristan Begg, who proposed what became this fantastic genome project to me in late 2014 while I was director of the Beethoven Center—one subsequently built with the expertise of many hands to whom we are grateful.
The organizing committee for the genome project has been a special pleasure to work with and learn from, and I must extend my own deep gratitude to Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig; Robert Attenborough, Cambridge University; Toomas Kivisid, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven; Maarten Larmuseau, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven; Tristan Begg, Cambridge University; and John Wilson, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. The world of Beethoven scholarship owes them a great debt. I am also indebted several times over to Julia Ronge, curator of the collections of the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, for her scholarly generosity and friendship.
Finally, I am grateful to my many friends in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who supported me while I completed my dissertation, including Joan Shapiro, Rachel Frew, and Ida Reed of the Music Library; Joan Thomson, who let me rent a one-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a beautiful house on Pritchard Avenue for such a ridiculously low price that the IRS kept asking her for justifying documentation and gave me her husband’s wonderful collection of composer letters; to my friends at Mr. Carmel Baptist Church and University Baptist Church for hiring me as choir director; to Michael Culpepper, who allowed me to use his word processor to turn in one of the first two word-processed dissertations ever submitted to UNC-CH in July 1985; and especially my parents, Charlotte and William, for their financial and moral support that enabled me to graduate without student loan debt. I am indebted to former Dean Arlene Okerlund and the search committee at SJSU who selected me to be the founding director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies in the spring of 1985 (and to my dissertation advisor Douglas Johnson who wrote them a convincing letter of recommendation); to Ira and Irma Brilliant for their inspiration, guidance, and friendship; to Patricia Stroh for helping create the best online bibliography for Beethoven studies and for her excellent curating of the collections and creation of exhibits; and especially to Dr. Thomas Wendel, founding president of the board of the American Beethoven Society, for his wisdom, joie de vivre, and friendship, and to all the members of the board and society who helped Ira’s and Arlene’s dream become a reality. Dr. William George, a founding member of the board, took me under his wing as mentor when I arrived and was a constant source of knowledge, inspiration, and humor.