Читать книгу Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Hilde Spiel - Страница 8

THE PRESENT WORK COULD HAVE BEEN BEGUN, BUT HARDLY brought to a reasonably satisfying conclusion without the generous help which I have received from members of the Pereira-Arnstein family. Although some of them are now deceased, I should like to record my gratitude to them.

In the first place I must express my thanks to Baroness Marie Rosine von Pereira-Arnstein, née Countess Mensdorff-Pouilly, for having entrusted to me valuable documents for examination, and for the tireless patience with which she herself contributed to their decipherment. I am equally indebted to Baron Fritz von Pereira-Arnstein, in whose hospitable house, Schloss Rothenturn in Carinthia, I found letters, notes and pictures of inestimable value for my work. Baronesses Lily von Pereira and Maria von Skrbensky did me the kindness of placing significant documents at my disposal.

I owe important clues concerning the Berlin family of my heroine to Frau Karoline Cauer, who, connected by marriage with the Mendelssohn and Itzig families, was in a position to provide me, among other documents, with Cäcilie Eskeles’s letter of 1809 from the besieged city of Vienna.

The indispensable but unfortunately fragmentary data from private sources needed to be supplemented by contemporary references which lay hidden in numerous documents and reports. To collect and examine this material would have been impossible without the help of a number of scholars and archivists. I would like to name above all Dr. Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau, who offered me access to all the files and records of the Viennese City Archives; Professor Dr. Erika Weinzierl, whose help was essential in the Austrian State Archives; Professor Dr. Hanns Leo Mikoletzky, the extremely helpful director of the archives of the Finanz-und Hofkammer; Professor Dr. Goldinger of the Adelsarchiv; Dr. Hedwig Kraus of the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; as well as the assistants and officials of the Austrian National Library and City Library of Vienna. Frau Ilse R. Wolff of the Wiener Library, London, gave me sympathetic and encouraging support.

Among the private researchers who readily offered advice and information were Dr. Jacob Jacobson of Worcester and Dr. Siegfried Ascher of Haifa, with a quantity of genealogical data; the noted musicologists Professor O. E. Deutsch and Dr Heinz Schöny; Mr. J. Christopher Herold, author of an excellent biography of Madame de Staël, and Dr. Maria Ullrichovà, an expert on the same subject; Professor Dr. Edwin Redslob; my fatherly friend Dr. Franz Kobler; Professor Hadumod Bussmann; Countess Maria Lanckoronska, and that most charming expert on the local history of Vienna, Herr Siegfried Weyr.

Last but nevertheless foremost I want to thank the translator, my daughter Christine Shuttleworth, for her resolve, tirelessly pursued with, to me at least, the greatest possible success, to find a suitable equivalent for every shade of meaning in this complicated web of history and biography. She has also compiled a new and greatly improved index. It is now her book as well as mine.