Chapter 4
We will probably never know why Beethoven’s hearing began to deteriorate in his late-twenties. Determining the cause of deafness, even in living patients today, can be a challenge: forensic pathologists who have reviewed the symptoms the composer described at various times have suggested at least a dozen possible causes, ranging from a bad fall to rheumatism, typhus, lead poisoning, and various hereditary diseases of the ear.
Beethoven seems to have begun noticing auditory problems sometime around 1798. His pain was both physical and emotional. He confided in 1801 to Franz Gerhard Wegeler, his childhood friend from Bonn, that his ears “whoosh and roar constantly, night and day.” He told Wegeler that he had consulted a series of doctors and that they had prescribed various cures for his “horrid condition”—cold baths, lukewarm baths, almond oil, pills, tea poured into the ears—none of which had done any good. For almost two years, he reported, he had avoided social gatherings, for he could not, as a musician, tell people that he was deaf. “What would my enemies—whose numbers are not inconsiderable—say about that?”
To give you some idea of this prodigious deafness, I would tell you that in the theater I have to place myself right next to the orchestra and even lean up against the railing in order to understand the actor. If I am a bit farther away I do not hear the high notes of the instruments or voices. It is remarkable that there are people who have never noticed this in conversation; they believe it’s because I so often seemed distracted.…Heaven alone knows what will come of this.…I have already often cursed the creator and my existence. Plutarch has guided me to resignation. If it is otherwise possible, I want to defy my fate, even though there will be moments in my life when I shall be God’s unhappiest creature.
The composer’s anxiety over his growing deafness came to a head in the fall of 1802 toward the end of a months-long stay in the spa village of Heiligenstadt (outside Vienna at the time but now within the city limits). The Heiligenstadt Testament is a remarkable document, one that must have consumed as much of his time and attention as any major composition up to that point. Written in what for him is an exceptionally clear hand, it is almost certainly a clean copy of an earlier, now-lost draft that was presumably full of revisions.
Directed to his two brothers, the document opens with the words “O ihr Menschen”—roughly, “To all humanity.” This is in effect Beethoven’s apology for himself, an explanation for his antisocial behavior. He laments the loss of the one sense so vital to a musician, a sense he felt he possessed to a degree that “few others in my profession have or have had.” He acknowledges that his advancing deafness has driven him from society and made him seem “antagonistic, obstinate, or misanthropic,” and he resolves to circulate in society only when he must.
If I approach any gathering of people I am overcome with a deep anxiety for fear of the danger that my condition will be noticed.…What a humiliation when someone standing next to me heard a flute from afar and I heard nothing; or when someone heard a shepherd singing and I heard nothing. Such incidents brought me to the edge of despair; only a little more of this and I should have taken my own life. It was only art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world before having produced everything that I felt called upon to bring forth. And so I endured this miserable life, truly miserable…. Patience, it is said…is what I must now choose as my guide…. Already in my twenty-eighth year I am compelled to become a philosopher. This is not easy for an artist, more difficult than for just anyone. Lord, you look down on my innermost self; you know and recognize that a love of humanity and a proclivity to good deeds lie there within. O ye who at some point read this, consider that you have done me wrong, and may the Unhappy One console himself by finding one of his kind who in spite of all the impediments of nature nevertheless did everything in his capacity to be accepted into the circle of worthy artists and humans.
The document concludes with brief instructions for the dispersal of his estate after his death and an expression of thanks to his physician and to his principal patron at the time, Prince Lichnowsky. A few days later he added this heartbreaking postscript:
Thus I take leave of you—and unhappily so. Yes, I must now abandon the beloved hope that I brought with me here [to Heiligenstadt] of being healed, at least to some degree.…I leave here almost as I came. Even the high spirit that often possessed me in the beautiful days of summer has vanished. O destiny: let a day of pure joy appear to me but once. For so long has the inner resonance of joy been foreign to me. Oh when, oh when, Lord, can I find that resonance again in the temple of nature and of mankind? Never? No. Oh, that would be too harsh.
Joy, by this reckoning, would come in the form of “inner resonance,” perceived sound. Having completed this highly personal message to posterity, Beethoven locked it away in a secret compartment of his writing desk, where it lay undiscovered until after his death.
As it turned out, his condition would stabilize somewhat in the decade that followed. But the Heiligenstadt Testament was no passing moment of despair: it would prove a roadmap for the conduct of his life. He avoided large gatherings whenever possible and developed ways of coping as needed; his reputation for sullenness and self-absorption no doubt helped in this regard. And he made good on the calling to “bring forth” as much as he could in the time allotted him. The decade that followed was even more productive than the one before.
What was left of his hearing took another sharp turn for the worse around 1812, however. He began using an ear trumpet on occasion—an inverted megaphone inserted into the ear, in effect—and by 1818 had to resort to conversation books, though eyewitness accounts make it clear that he did not always need them. He was never totally deaf, and it is possible he understood certain voices, or voices in certain registers, better than others.
3. Beethoven used a variety of ear trumpets from 1812 onward and commented at one point about the usefulness of different types for conversation, for the concert hall, and for rooms of different sizes.
Deafness posed a greater obstacle to Beethoven’s career as a performer than as a composer. Widely regarded as one of the city’s greatest piano virtuosos, he had to give up performing in public around 1815. He was still playing at private gatherings as late as 1822, but witnesses describe him as playing far too loudly at times and so softly at others that even his listeners could hear nothing. He was nevertheless eager to keep up to date with the latest advances in piano technology. Viennese, French, and English pianos differed in their mechanisms, tone, and range, and he was particularly taken with the English Broadwood that the manufacturer sent him as a gift in 1818. Soon afterward, he began experimenting with an apparatus on top of the instrument, a shell-shaped device that amplified its sound by directing it immediately toward the player seated at the keyboard. Recent hypothetical reconstructions of this resonator have produced intriguing results and help give at least some sense of what Beethoven might have heard while at work on his last three piano sonatas, opp. 109, 110, and 111.
Deafness also compromised Beethoven’s abilities as a conductor, even if it did not inhibit him from making extreme gesticulations on the podium, as one eyewitness observed in 1814:
Seized by the power of tones and striving to flow with them, he created a highly interesting spectacle. When the music becomes soft he spontaneously crouches down and keeps things together with a only a faint movement of the arms. When the music gets loud he grapples like a giant with his entire body—he beats, he flails—in short, he is himself the living image of his music.
Entertaining as this display may have been, his technique left much to be desired, and multiple accounts describe the confusion he was apt to sow among an orchestra’s players. One performance of Fidelio in 1822 was nothing short of a calamity: he was compelled to leave in the middle of the opera and cede the baton to someone else. By the time of the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, he indicated the tempo at the beginning of each movement but did not actually conduct.
How did deafness affect Beethoven’s ability to compose? And did it manifest itself in his music? Without downplaying the hardship of his condition, we must keep in mind that composers who have lost their hearing typically retain the capacity to imagine music in their mind’s ear: they can still read a score and recreate the sound in their heads. A deaf composer, in other words, is not nearly as remarkable as a blind painter.
As for the effects of deafness on specific compositions, we can only speculate. More than one critic has called attention to the close temporal proximity of the Heiligenstadt Testament and Christ on the Mount of Olives (1802). Beethoven’s only oratorio, this telling of the Passion story gives unusual prominence to Christ’s acceptance of his fate, and the composer must surely have been aware of the parallel to his own suffering.
Deafness would have also aggravated his self-confessed tendency toward melancholy, a condition he complained of as early as 1787 and explicitly portrayed in the finale of his String Quartet in B-flat Major, op. 18, no. 6 (1800), which he labeled “La Malinconia.” The labyrinthine progression of increasingly dissonant harmonies at the beginning of this movement, as one scholar has recently suggested, supports the idea that this passage might represent the experience of encroaching deafness. From his many consultations with physicians, Beethoven would undoubtedly have had a basic knowledge of the structure of the inner ear and its labyrinth. The crisis in the finale of op. 18, no. 6, is resolved when the music shifts to a new theme at a fast tempo in the major mode. But the crisis is not resolved in a single step: the slow-moving dissonances return later on, quite unexpectedly, only to be vanquished once again.
This same pattern appears in the finale of the Fifth Symphony (1807), another work that critics have connected to the composer’s deafness. One particularly intriguing reading of the work observes that the order in which the wind instruments drop out one by one toward the end of the third movement mirrors Beethoven’s own description of his gradual loss of hearing: the flutes, the highest instrument, are altogether absent when the opening theme returns (“what a humiliation when someone standing next to me heard a flute from afar and I heard nothing”). The clarinets and oboes, in the middle register, are the next to drop out, leaving at the end only the bassoons, the lowest of the wind instruments. But even these disappear, and toward the end of the movement we hear only the rumbling of the low strings with an odd “croaking” figure that might conceivably approximate the constant rumbling sound he heard in his own ears. This passage of extreme and extended low volume—more than a minute and a half in performance—flows without a break into the finale, whose opening, marked fortissimo (extremely loud), introduces instruments not heard before in this work: three trombones, a piccolo, and a contrabassoon. The sudden contrast in volume is overwhelming. The trombones are easily the loudest instruments in the orchestra, and the new winds extend the upper and lower boundaries of the ensemble’s register: the piccolo is higher than any instrument we have heard to this point, the contrabassoon as low as the lowest. As in the finale of op. 18, no. 6, the crisis repeats itself: the passage with the ominously low volume from the end of the third movement returns and is followed once again by an overwhelmingly loud fanfare.
More than a few critics have found the tone of this jubilant finale to ring hollow: it is a little too jubilant, insisting on a sense of triumph so forcefully and at such length as to call into question the conviction behind its expression. This is a fair criticism, to be sure; again, there are no right or wrong ways to hear this music. But no one would deny the audible trajectory from crisis to triumph, and if we think of the Fifth as an essay in ideals, we can hear it as Beethoven’s imagined recovery of his longed-for “inner resonance.”
Indeed, the pointed contrasts in volume throughout the Fifth Symphony lend support to Anton Schindler’s report of the composer likening the opening motif of the first movement to “fate pounding at the portal.” (The common English translation, “Thus fate knocks at the door,” misses the violence and scale of the original German: So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte.) This might well be yet another of Schindler’s many fabrications. On the other hand, we can speak of emotions in music only metaphorically, and if the “theme” of the Sixth Symphony (“Pastoral”) is nature, it is not so far-fetched to think of the Fifth—written at the same time—as an essay on fate and the struggle against it.
Is this how Beethoven intended us to hear these works? Perhaps. But even if one accepts such speculative readings, they do not exhaust the implications of the music. Those who are inclined to search for autobiographical clues in his music are likely to accept Schindler’s report about the Fifth Symphony’s “meaning.” They are also likely to connect that report with Beethoven’s promise to “grab fate by the throat” in his 1801 letter to Wegeler in which he confessed his growing deafness. That the context of this vow is medical rather than musical makes no difference to those predisposed to hear the life in the works. The composer’s oft-quoted line about fate appears after a long list of health complaints, comments on his current doctor, and queries about Wegeler’s opinion of other physicians and possible treatments, including Galvanism, the use of electrical currents to stimulate the auditory nerves. There is not the slightest suggestion that the act of “grabbing fate by the throat” might manifest itself musically. To what extent the composer’s personal emotions found their way into his music remains a question that defies any clear answer. As far as his deafness is concerned, we can say with certainty only that his disability helped him—indeed, forced him—to approach his art from a highly uncommon perspective.