The Autobiography of Karl von Dittersdorf

This autobiography of the famous Austrian composer, violinist and silvologist Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf was dictated from his death-bed, completed only two days before the artist’s death on 24 October 1799. First published in 1896, it represents a valuable as the record of an artist’s every-day life at the close of the 18th century.

“Dittersdorf, the honest chronicler of his own failures and successes, should have his say in England as well as in Germany. If not ornate, he is true. Haydn’s imaginary talk, as given in George Sand’s ‘Consuelo,’ is hard to reconcile with the language of Haydn’s Diary. In this plain-spoken little volume we hear the very words uttered by men of genius, not those coined for them by others.”—A. D. Coleridge, Preface