T he year 1983-84 marked a valued opportunity for me to concentrate fully on research and writing at North Carolina's elegant National Humanities Center. By all rights it should have assured the completion of my overdue book on Playing Beethoven's Piano Music According to Beethoven, especially since nearly every chapter had already appeared in some earlier version. But the year ended with yet another year to go. The problem that came up, soon proving thornier than expected, was how to handle Anton Schindler's wholesale forgeries within a primary Beethoven source, the so-called Conversation Books. Reported mostly during the previous thirteen years, the disclosures of these forgeries had been threatening more and more to knock the very props from under some of our most cherished notions about the interpretation of Beethoven's musicparticularly about his tempos, rhythmic organization, and articulation. It is no wonder that the editor of the Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift wrote recently of the enormous importance of correcting the Beethoven concept [that has been] distorted to such an unsuspected degree by Schindler. In the light of Schindler's fast crumbling reputation, the aim in the present essay is to determine in so far as possible whether his transgressions extended to another important source connected with him. That source is a series of annotations Beethoven is supposed to have inserted in twenty-one Etudes by his esteemed contemporary, the pianist-composer Johann Baptist Cramer. Concerned mainly with local rhythmic, melodic, and accentual details in the passagework, the annotations comprise potentially the most significant of all Beethoven's interpretive advices that go back to Schindler-potentially, that is, if they prove authentic. Yet, although this document has given pause to recent Beethoven researchers, so far it does not happen ever to have been challenged seriously as to its basic validity nor to have been proclaimed as a forgery, at least not yet in print.2 The present essay presents, in turn, a capsule sketch of Schindler's career, an overview of his forgeries that have been confirmed thus far, a brief description of Beethoven's supposed annotations in Cramer's Etudes as they might bear on his own performance intentions, a consideration of the authenticity of those annotations, and a proposal for resolving the problem.