ABSTRACT
Any study of the life, work and historical significance of a personality-especially in the arts-has to broadly (though not exclusively) depend on sources that are subject to the contingencies of tradition and the availability of documentation, whether it be fragmentary and inadequate as with Homer or Shakespeare, overflowing and barely manageable as with Mendelssohn and Goethe, or extensive but not overwhelming as with Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach. The extent of the documentation depends on whether the aim is to organize an exhaustive collection of sources or to limit the selection to what is thought to be important.
