So if Beethoven was completely
deaf, how did he compose?
"For the last three years my
hearing has grown steadily weaker..." - so wrote Beethoven, aged 30, in a
letter to a friend.
the most important musician since Mozart. By
his mid-20s, he had studied with Haydn and was celebrated as a brilliant,
virtuoso pianist.
By the time he turned 30 he had
composed a couple of piano concertos, six string quartets, and his first
symphony. Everything was looking pretty good for the guy, with the prospect of
a long, successful career ahead.
Then, he started to notice a
buzzing sound in his ears - and everything was about to change.
How old was Beethoven when he
started going deaf?
Around the age of 26, Beethoven
began to hear buzzing and ringing in his ears. In 1800, aged 30, he wrote from
Vienna to a childhood friend - by then working as a doctor in Bonn - saying
that he had been suffering for some time:
"For the last three years my
hearing has grown steadily weaker. I can give you some idea of this peculiar
deafness when I must tell you that in the theatre I have to get very close to
the orchestra to understand the performers, and that from a distance I do not
hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices… Sometimes too I
hardly hear people who speak softly. The sound I can hear it is true, but not
the words. And yet if anyone shouts I can’t bear it."
Beethoven tried to keep news of
the problem secret from those closest to him. He feared his career would be
ruined if anyone realised.
"For two years I have
avoided almost all social gatherings because it is impossible for me to say to
people 'I am deaf'," he wrote. "If I belonged to any other profession
it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state."
Once Beethoven was out for a
country ramble with fellow composer Ferdinand Ries, and while walking they saw
a shepherd playing a pipe. Beethoven would have seen from Ries's face that
there was beautiful music playing, but he couldn't hear it. It's said that
Beethoven was never the same again after this incident, because he had
confronted his deafness for the first time.
Beethoven could apparently still
hear some speech and music until 1812. But by the age of 44, he was almost
totally deaf and unable to hear voices or so many of the sounds of his beloved
countryside. It must have been devastating for him.
Why did Beethoven go deaf?
The exact cause of his hearing
loss is unknown. Theories range from syphilis to lead poisoning, typhus, or
possibly even his habit of plunging his head into cold water to keep himself
awake.
At one point he claimed he had
suffered a fit of rage in 1798 when someone interrupted him at work. Having
fallen over, he said, he got up to find himself deaf. At other times he blamed
it on gastrointestinal problems.
"The cause of this must be
the condition of my belly which as you know has always been wretched and has
been getting worse," he wrote, "since I am always troubled with
diarrhoea, which causes extraordinary weakness."
An autopsy carried out after he
died found he had a distended inner ear, which developed lesions over time.
Here's Beethoven's famous
Symphony No.5, written in 1804. Its famous opening motif is often referred to
as 'fate knocking at the door'; the cruel hearing loss that he feared would
afflict him for the rest of his life.
If he couldn't hear, how did he
write music?
Beethoven had heard and played
music for the first three decades of his life, so he knew how instruments and
voices sounded and how they worked together. His deafness was a slow
deterioration, rather than a sudden loss of hearing, so he could always imagine
in his mind what his compositions would sound like.
Beethoven's housekeepers
remembered that, as his hearing got worse, he would sit at the piano, put a
pencil in his mouth, touching the other end of it to the soundboard of the
instrument, to feel the vibration of the note.
Did Beethoven's deafness change
his music?
Yes. In his early works, when
Beethoven could hear the full range of frequencies, he made use of higher notes
in his compositions. As his hearing
failed, he began to use the lower notes that he could hear more clearly. Works
including the Moonlight Sonata, his only opera Fidelio and six symphonies were
written during this period. The high notes returned to his compositions towards
the end of his life which suggests he was hearing the works take shape in his
imagination.
Here's Beethoven's Große Fuge,
Op. 133, written by the deaf Beethoven in 1826, formed entirely of those sounds
of his imagination.
Beethoven Grosse Fugue Op.133
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Did Beethoven continue to
perform?
He did. But he ended up wrecking
pianos by banging on them so hard in order to hear the notes.
After watching Beethoven in a
rehearsal in 1814 for the Archduke Trio, the composer Louis Spohr said:
"In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings
jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were
omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the
pianoforte part. I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate."
When it came to the premiere of
his massive Ninth Symphony, Beethoven insisted on conducting. The orchestra
hired another conductor, Michael Umlauf to stand alongside the composer. Umlauf
told the performers to follow him and ignore Beethoven's directions.
The symphony received rapturous
applause which Beethoven could not hear. Legend has it that the young contralto
Carolina Unger approached the maestro and turned him around to face the
audience, to see the ovation.