Gail S. Altman

Who is Gail S. Altman?

Gail S. Altman is an educator, biographer, and Beethoven scholar notable for her published studies of two of the more disputed aspects of the life of composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

In the first of these, Fatal Links: the Curious Deaths of Beethoven and the Two Napoleons, Altman puts forward the hypothesis that Beethoven's death was the result of deliberate poisoning on the part of agents of the Viennese authorities, at the same time drawing parallels with the deaths of Napoleon Bonaparte and his son Napoleon II, the latter at the hands of the same Viennese authorities, by whom he was kept a virtual prisoner throughout most of his short life. Fatal Links draws exclusively on source evidence of letters and eye-witness reports and, while she was not privy to subsequent medical analysis of Beethoven's hair, her conclusions - that he showed symptoms of lead or arsenic poisoning - accord well with the result of the chemical analysis.

In her second, and more substantial, biographical study of the composer, Altman investigates and refutes the claims of Maynard Solomon for the identification of the woman who Beethoven, in an undated letter found among his effects, referred to as his "Immortal Beloved", while building a thorough case—using Solomon's own criteria—for Anna-Marie Erdödy as the putative recipient of the letter.