Question

Ludwig van Beethoven is considered a transitional figure in music history and he is the first composer that we really think of as truly “suffering for his art” because of his tragic hearing loss. Describe what we know about when Beethoven started to lose his hearing and how that affected his musical output

Answer 1

In his 20s, Beethoven began experiencing issues with his hearing. The first symptom was tinnitus, a high-pitched droning sound that interferes with clarity and definition in hearing. By then, Beethoven was already well known as a composer and performer, and of course he continued to compose until his death at the age of 56. However, his career as a performer (he was a gifted pianist from a very young age) ended when the tinnitus overwhelmed his ability to hear his own playing, much less the other instruments onstage.

Beethoven’s gradually intensifying hearing problems, of course, were a source of great concern for him and figure prominently in the above-quoted “Heilegenstadt Testament,” a letter he wrote to his brothers in 1802. In that remarkable document, discovered among his papers after his death, he shares that his hearing loss sparked in him a life-and-death crisis, writing, “I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back.”

The maestro did continue, to the great benefit of audiences around the globe. In fact, not only did he continue, but his music changed, deepened, and became even more profound as he slipped ineluctably into his final years of profound deafness.

During Beethoven’s early years as a musician, when his hearing was not an issue, he was strongly influenced by Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, masters of the age whose work he found inspiring. In fact, he studied with Haydn and others, in Vienna, and several early works in a strong upper range were clearly indebted to Mozart.

It has been said of Beethoven that he was fully deaf when he wrote all his great works, but that he was able to compose, perform, and even conduct his work without being able to hear a note.

This masterful late period, from approximately 1815 to his death in 1827, corresponded with Beethoven’s final descent into complete deafness. By this time, he was using “conversation books” to communicate with those around him and was employing his prodigious gift for musical composition to create some of his most memorable, mysterious, and transcendent work.

From late 1826 he was quite ill, and doctors reached a point where they believed that all they could do had been done. His closest friends and a sister-in-law were present by his bed on March 26, 1827, as he breathed his final breaths. The actual cause of his death remains undetermined, but liver disease is the likeliest reason. The autopsy revealed a severe case of cirrhosis of the liver and some evidence of lead poisoning.

Beethoven’s body of musical compositions stands with Shakespeare’s plays at the outer limits of human accomplishment. And the fact Beethoven composed his most beautiful and extraordinary music while deaf is an almost superhuman feat of creative genius.