Had 1772 been the correct date the child could never have retained personal recollections of a man who died on December 24, 1773. A survey of the whole ground renders the conclusion irresistible that at the time when the boy began to attract notice by his skill upon the pianoforte and by the promise of his first attempts in composition, his age was purposely falsified, a motive for which may perhaps be found in the excitement caused in the musical world by the then recent career of the Mozart children, and in the reflection that attainments which in a child of eight or ten years excite wonder and astonishment are considered hardly worthy of special remark in one a few years older. There is, unfortunately, nothing known of Johann van Beethoven’s character which renders such a trick improbable. Noteworthy is it that, at first, the falsification rarely extends beyond one year; and, also, that in an official report in 1784 the correct age is given. Here an untruth could not be risked, nor be of advantage if it had been. Dr. C. M. Kneisel, who championed the cause of the house in the Bonngasse in a controversy conducted in the “Kölnische Zeitung” in 1845, touching the birthplace of Beethoven, remarks that the mother “was, as is known, a native of the Ehrenbreitstein valley and separated from her relatives; he (Johann van Beethoven) was without relatives and in somewhat straitened circumstances financially. What, then, was more natural than that he should invite his neighbor, Frau Baum, a respected and well-to-do woman, _in whose house the baptismal feast was held_, to be sponsor for his little son?” This last fact indicates clearly the narrowness of the quarters in which the young couple dwelt. Does it not also hint that the grandfather was now a solitary man with no home in which to spread the little feast? Let Johann van Beethoven himself describe the pecuniary condition in which he found himself upon the death of his father: Most Reverend Archbishop, Most Gracious Elector and Lord, Lord.