Beethoven’s Deafness: Myth, Reality, and Perception

Symptoms and possible causes

Outwardly, the beginning of the nineteenth century was a happy time for Beethoven. He had been living in Vienna, Europe’s musical capital, for nearly ten years. The premiere of the First Symphony was by most accounts successful. Publishers were fighting to print his pieces. A slew of other well-received premieres and performances seemed to bode well for the composer as he entered his fourth decade.

Amid this success, Beethoven harbored the secret of his encroaching deafness. Letters written in 1801 show the first recorded mention of his symptoms. He wrote to a doctor, “My ears buzz and roar day and night. …in the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and … 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.” To another friend he fretted, “You will realize what a sad life I must now lead, seeing that I am cut off from everything that is dear and precious to me.”

The cause of this hearing loss remains a mystery. Recent studies have suggested lead poisoning, while others have proposed syphilis, inflammatory bowel disease, and autoimmune disorders. An autopsy performed shortly after his death revealed abnormalities in his inner ear, though no cause was determined.

The Heiligenstadt Testament

On his doctor’s advice, in 1802 Beethoven retreated to the small town of Heiligenstadt. He hoped that the quiet of this holy city might save him, but in the silence he found something else entirely. He drafted a last will and testament to his brothers that remained undiscovered until his death. This impassioned missive, now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, reveals his anguish at the loss of his hearing. “But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing! Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair. Little more, and I would have put an end to my life—it was only my art that held me back.”

Around the time of the Heiligenstadt crisis, he mused, “I am only somewhat satisfied with my previous works. From today on I will take a new path.” Soon after writing the Testament, Beethoven returned to Vienna and did exactly that. He produced a series of works in what has come to be called his “heroic” middle period. Early compositions from these years include the Third Symphony and his dramatic rescue opera, Fidelio. Though the symphony was initially dedicated to Napoleon, many find its themes of heroic struggle autobiographical. Similarly, the composer may have sympathized with the character of Florestan, imprisoned and isolated within a noiseless cell.

Hearing devices and pianos

As his hearing deteriorated, Beethoven utilized a variety of tools to communicate as well as to hear and compose music. With all legendary figures, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. One legend claims that he sawed the legs off one of his pianos so he could feel the vibrations through the floor. Another insists that he held a stick between his teeth to serve as a resonator. While evidence for these tales is scant, we know more about the tools he did use.

Ear trumpets

Around 1814, he began using ear trumpets for conversations and listening to performances. We don’t know if he used them to assist in playing or composing. Some were designed by inventor Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. In addition to improved ear trumpets, he patented the metronome Beethoven used in later years. Mälzel also invented the panharmonicon, an automaton that played military band instruments.

Conversation books

Beethoven used conversation books to communicate in his final decade. Visitors would write in these books and the composer would respond verbally. Contrary to popular belief, he was not totally deaf when he began using the conversation books in 1818. In fact, years later one of his friends remarked that rumors of his hearing loss were exaggerated.

Pianos, resonator plates, and the Hearing Machine

Beethoven lived through an incredible chapter in the history of the keyboard. Cast-iron frame pianos with greater dynamic range, sustaining power, and tonal range (the five-octaves that were standard when Mozart died increased to seven within a few decades) supplanted the harpsichord and fortepiano. Broadwood, one of the most important piano manufacturers of their day, gifted Beethoven one of their latest models. However, he asked them to make it louder to accommodate his hearing.

When that failed, he sought further modifications. He asked one manufacturer to install a resonator plate at the base of the instrument; its effectiveness was debatable. Another persuaded him to install a “Gehörmaschine” (“hearing machine”) on his Broadwood. Though no image of this resonator exists, it was likely a concave device made of sheet metal, placed atop the piano to focus sound toward the player.

Did deafness change Beethoven’s music?

A question rife with pitfalls

Answering this question comes with challenges. Beethoven was famously private, stating, “I have adopted the principle never publicly to write anything about myself, nor to reply to anything written about me.” The conversation books, though an invaluable record of his daily activities, remain one-sided conversations, and many of them were lost or destroyed. 

More importantly, art is subjective. What one may decry as harsh, another may praise as “drastic and bittersweet,” in the words of one reviewer of the Fifteenth String Quartet. The very elements of a piece that create confusion, such as dissonance, or rulebreaking, or even ugliness, may be what elevates it. Great art is often initially misunderstood and rejected, regardless of the person creating it. We can speculate on how Beethoven’s hearing physiologically or even psychologically affected his music, but none of us can inhabit his body or hear exactly what he heard and how he heard it. 

Historical perspectives

Listeners have attempted to answer this question for more than two centuries. Even during his lifetime, critics opined on the effect deafness had on the late works; small wonder that he desired to keep his condition secret. For roughly the first forty years after his death, the consensus was that his deafness resulted in inferior works. One author suggested that what appeared good on the page was a “wild jumble” to everyone else. “Telling harshnesses” in the Missa solemnis were indicative of deficiency. Even Richard Wagner used Beethoven’s deafness as justification to re-orchestrate the Ninth Symphony.

Yet it was Wagner who, in an essay celebrating Beethoven’s centenary, proposed a paradigm-shifting view. Rather than framing deafness as a disability, Wagner argued that it was vital to his creative process. He wrote, “A musician sans ears!—Can one conceive an eyeless painter?

But the blinded Seer we know. … his fellow is the deaf musician who now, untroubled by life’s uproar, but listens to his inner harmonies, now from his depths but speaks to that world—for it has nothing more to tell him. So is genius freed from all outside it, at home forever with and in itself.”

Others quickly adopted this stance, imbuing it with religious and mythological overtones and the idealization of the Romantic figure of solitary genius: the monk forced to turn inward, a modern-day Prometheus. Franz Liszt, mirroring the tripartite division of Beethoven’s stylistic periods, dubbed these eras “the child, the man, and the god.” Contemporary philosophies on suffering complemented these views. “Certain kinds of suffering and abnormal states,” Max Weber wrote, “provoked through chastisements are avenues to the attainment of superhuman, i.e., magical power.” To this day, these outdated views shape our conception of the composer.

But what can the music tell us?

When Beethoven composed his Symphony No. 5 in C minor in the mid-1800s, his hearing was still largely intact. It’s unlikely that music from these years reveals significant physiological limitations on his hearing; some scholars, however, have proposed deliberate representations of his symptoms in this work. In the third movement, pizzicato and bowed strings quietly overlap one another. Could this be a depiction of the “buzzing and roaring” that Beethoven heard? Later in the movement the woodwinds gradually fade away, leaving only the lower instruments to play a triple-piano drone. This loss of high woodwind notes echoes the composer’s own early symptoms.

This symphony was his first in a minor key. Its finale broke with convention by ending in the parallel key of C major. The composer himself wrote, “Many assert that every minor piece must end in the minor. Nego! … Joy follows sorrow, sunshine—rain.” This outlook may reflect his post-Heiligenstadt resolve.

A decade after the Fifth, Beethoven completed his massive Hammerklavier piano sonata. Listeners found the complex and difficult music incomprehensible. Some speculated that its formidably fast tempos were a result of his deafness (or perhaps a faulty metronome). Decades later, Nietzsche suggested that the sonata was “insufficient;” had Beethoven not been deaf, he asserted, he might have orchestrated the work into a grand symphony. The music itself, however, reveals a composer experimenting with both musical form and the power of the latest pianos. Throughout the sonata, the use of the una corda pedal, as well as detailed instructions for using it, suggest subtly expressive approaches to volume and tone. 

The groundbreaking Symphony No. 9 in D minor, with its choral finale and triumphant turn from minor to major, also left listeners puzzled. Early critics, writes musicologist Nicholas Cook, rejected the finale “as cryptic and eccentric, the product of a deaf and aging composer.” Giuseppe Verdi, king of Italian opera, disliked the vocal writing, though he did not blame Beethoven’s hearing. The finale’s high-flying piccolo solos may also be symptomatic of his deafness, perhaps the only sound capable of registering after so many years. Then again, a thundering chorus and piercing woodwinds seem perfectly suited to expressing the highest summits of joy.

“Here, my dear friend, is my last quartet. … and indeed it has given me much trouble.” Beethoven completed the Sixteenth String Quartet in October 1826, five months before his death. It was his last major work, and by this point the composer was likely totally deaf. In its lively scherzo, he repeats a five-note motif nearly four dozen times. A contemporary noted this unusual repetition, asking, “has this tone-picture burrowed its way into his spirit with its buzzing, perhaps from the diseased auditory nerves?”

When his Thirteenth String Quartet premiered earlier that year, one reviewer described the original finale as “incomprehensible, like Chinese.” The same critic speculated that this “confusion of Babel” would have been avoided if Beethoven had been able to hear. His publishers were so concerned that they gently asked him to write a new ending; he obliged, and the original finale was released as the Grosse Fugue.

Some have hypothesized that since he gradually lost his ability to hear higher frequencies, this may be reflected in the amount of high notes in his pieces. Few efforts, however, have been made to quantify this, and the results have been inconclusive. One study analyzed the highest frequencies found in the nine symphonies, finding no significant decline in high pitches from the first to the last. A study of the quartets, however, concluded that his use of high notes decreased with age. Neither study examined every bar of music that Beethoven wrote, and both ignore factors unrelated to auditory processing, such as the individual character of a given work. 

The artist as a complete person

Dr. Joseph Straus, a professor at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has written at length about the intersection of music and disability. He posits that we must view Beethoven as a complete person influenced by more than his disability. His life has become cultural shorthand for triumph over adversity, but as Dr. Straus writes, “The ideas that Beethoven overcame his deafness or that his deafness made his music bad or extra great are wrong. The deafness is crucial to his music, but not in any of these mystical or stigmatizing ways. Rather, I would say, his deafness enables his music.” “Disability is a portal,” the late American disability rights activist Alice Wong wrote, “a way of focusing our gaze and sharpening our lens on the intricacies of our humanity.”

Does Beethoven’s music reflect changes brought about by his deafness? Surely the answer must be yes. After he resolved to continue composing in the face of his disability, he inaugurated his transformative “heroic” period, creating some of his most iconic works. As his relationship to sound physically changed he innovated, finding new ways to hear and feel sound; this too must have impacted his art. Yet so did the shifting artistic, cultural, and political landscapes around him, as did his personal triumphs and tragedies. But as a symphony’s beauty springs not from a single chord or melody, so too is a life more than any one of its parts.