Bonn Court Administration Files

The administrative archives of the Bonn Electoral Court, preserved today in the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen in Duisburg, Germany (D-DGla), reach back to at least the tenth century. Extensive documentation of the court's operations, however, only really exists since the late seventeenth century — after the city of Bonn was put under siege during the Nine Years' War and largely destroyed in 1689.

The Beethoven-related files in the court archives were first surveyed by Alexander Wheelock Thayer for the first volume of his monumental biography, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, whose first edition appeared in 1866. Thayer cast his net wide and the biography includes an impressive array of not only materials pertaining to the Beethoven family, but also of many of their colleagues. His transcriptions, typically unabridged, were a model of accuracy for their time. They are in fact so good and so seemingly comprehensive that no later Beethoven biographer has needed to consult the original sources. After the archive's multiple reorganizations and one change of location (it was in Düsseldorf until 2014), even most Beethoven scholars would be hard-pressed to locate the modern shelf-mark of any document quoted by Thayer, much less to retrace his footsteps and search for something he might have missed.