The Deaf Composer

The theatre in Vienna was full. Every seat was taken, and people stood wherever they could find space. It was the evening of 7 May 1824, and they had come to hear something new by the most famous composer in the city.

On the stage stood a large orchestra, a choir and four singers. And among them, facing the musicians, stood a stocky man of fifty-three with wild grey hair, beating time with his arms.

His name was Ludwig van Beethoven. He had written every note of the music that was about to fill the hall. And he was almost completely deaf.

A boy at the keyboard

Beethoven was born in 1770 in Bonn, a small city on the River Rhine, in what is now Germany. His father was a singer at the local court, and a harsh teacher. He made the young Ludwig practise the keyboard for hours, sometimes late into the night.

The boy was gifted. By his teens he was playing in the court orchestra and composing his own music. At twenty-one he moved to Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, and soon became known as a dazzling pianist. Audiences had never heard anyone play with such power and feeling.

Then, when he was still in his late twenties, something terrible began to happen. A ringing and buzzing started in his ears. Sounds became faint and muddled. Year by year, his hearing slipped away.

The letter he never sent

For a musician, this felt like the cruellest possible fate. Beethoven hid it for as long as he could. He avoided company, afraid people would notice that he could not follow their conversation.

In 1802, staying in the quiet village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna, he wrote a long letter to his two brothers. In it he poured out his misery. He admitted that he had come close to ending his own life. What held him back, he wrote, was his art: he felt he could not leave the world until he had brought out all the music he felt was inside him.

He never sent the letter. It was found among his papers after his death, and it is now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Beethoven went back to Vienna and kept working. In the years that followed, he wrote some of the most powerful music the world had heard.

Music in silence

By his forties, Beethoven could no longer play in public or hear an orchestra properly. Friends and visitors talked to him by writing in small notebooks, and he answered aloud. Many of these "conversation books" still survive.

But he could still compose. He could hear the music in his mind, the way a reader can hear words on a page without saying them aloud. He knew so deeply how each instrument sounded that he could write for them all without hearing a note.

For years he worked on a new symphony, his ninth. It was longer and grander than anything he had written. And in its final movement he did something nobody had done before in a symphony: he added a choir and singers. They sang words from a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the "Ode to Joy", about all people becoming brothers and sisters.

The evening of the premiere

On that May evening in 1824, Beethoven stood on stage beside the official conductor, Michael Umlauf. Umlauf had quietly told the musicians to follow him, not Beethoven, since the composer could not hear whether they were together.

So Beethoven stood and moved with the music he heard only in his head, while the real music thundered around him.

When the last great chorus ended, the hall erupted. People clapped, cheered and stood. But Beethoven, the story goes, was still facing the orchestra, lost in the score, a little behind the performers. He heard nothing.

One of the singers, the young contralto Caroline Unger, stepped over and gently turned him around to face the audience. Only then did he see it: a whole theatre on its feet, clapping and waving hats and handkerchiefs in the air, so that he could see the applause he could not hear.

Ode to joy

Beethoven lived for less than three more years. He died in Vienna in March 1827, and thousands of people followed his funeral procession through the streets.

The Ninth Symphony did not die with him. It is now one of the most performed pieces of music in the world. The melody of the "Ode to Joy" was chosen as the anthem of Europe. It was played in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is sung by huge choirs in Japan every December.

A man who had once thought his life was over because he could not hear went on to write music that the whole world still listens to, two hundred years later.

Want to read more?

Jan Swafford's Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph is a rich and readable life of the composer. Harvey Sachs's The Ninth tells the story of the symphony and the world it was born into. And the best way to finish this story is simply to listen to the last movement of the Ninth.