Richard Todd wrote:

>There seems to be virtual unanimity on this list that Solomon was wrong
>in his Brentano deduction.  He admits that there is room for reasonable
>doubt, but it seems to me that he presents a plausible case for the
>identification.  As for a letter in the possession of a mysterious
>nobleman, but unavailable to anyone else . . .  come on now!

Actually, if you talk to musicologists privately, there is hardly anybody
who doesn't think that many of Solomon's "results" are nonsense.  That
regards Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.  So privately, there is something
close to a consensus that he is completely wrong on many counts.  It also
doesn't help that he keeps committing egregious mistranslations from the
German, which pretty much disqualifies him from doing research on any
German or Austrian composer.  Officially, he is untouchable.  He's invited
here and there, and a year or two ago became an honorary member of the
American Musicological Society.  Why this double standard, I don't know.

As for the Immortal Beloved, that was quite a problem in The New Grove
II (the one just published), because officially, nobody dared to write
in the entry on Beethoven that the identity of the woman is still unknown,
but privately, at least some of the parties involved knew very well that
Solomon's hypothesis doesn't hold water.  That much for scholarship being
about looking for truth.

As for manuscripts in private possession, it's unfortunately not unusual
that owners don't want to make the ms.  accessible to scholars, let alone
to be published - be it a letter or a musical ms.  There is nothing in this
piece of information that could give you a good reason to deride Joyce.
The gentleman may be mysterious to you, but perhaps not to Joyce - not
everything one knows can be posted on a public forum.  Sometimes one has
to be very circumspect, and then indeed there is no way to prove that what
one says is an inside info and not something invented.

Sometimes such mss.  are auctioned, but the big auction houses are very
careful to make sure that the identity of both the seller and the buyer are
not revealed.  Actually, an amazingly large number of mss.  changes hands
all the time at auctions.  Others stay in the family, but when the
collector dies, the family may have no clue about the value of the mss.
and then anything can happen with the valuable material.

-Margaret