Allan S. Haley graduated magna cum laudefrom Harvard with a degree in music in 1966, and went on to study music and law at the University of Freiburg, in Germany.  He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1970.

            After ten years of practice in Honolulu, Allan returned to his home town in northern California to start a local winery with some partners.  Ever since he has managed to combine the joys of winemaking, solving legal problems, and making and studying music.

            Beethoven Unbound is Allan’s first book. It is a greatly enlarged version of the honors thesis he wrote under the tutelage of Professor Elliot Forbes at Harvard in 1966, with notes and scholarship brought up to the present day.  The subject of the thesis was a Beethoven sketchbook (called “the Wielhorsky” after its long-time owner) that had been published in Moscow in 1962, but with annotations only in Russian. Allan mastered that language and translated, for the first time into English and for his own use in the thesis, a good part of the Russian editor’s notes on the sketchbook and its contents, which furnish a unique portal into the genesis of Beethoven's Third Symphony.  

            The 1962 publication remains largely unknown to the musical world, since no translation into any other language has yet appeared.  As a result, Allan hopes that this book will assist in bringing the importance of the Wielhorsky sketchbook to a wider audience.