The Deaf Composer: How Beethoven wrote music he couldn’t hear

we get started, this episode is clean as always, but discusses Beethoven's experience with isolation, depression, and thoughts of giving up on life.

If you have younger listeners who may not be ready for that kind of discussion, you may want to preview it first.

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I'm Dallas Taylor.

I grew up playing trumpet in the school band, and for 15 years, music was my purpose, my biggest passion, and my escape from a difficult home life.

It also sparked my lifelong love of classical music.

Then in college, I decided to pursue conducting.

During that time, I did a work study in the music library.

Now, keep in mind, this was long before Spotify, YouTube, or even Napster.

So, having thousands of classical recordings at my fingertips felt magical.

I'd spend hours getting lost in pieces by Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bach, and of course, Beethoven.

In Beethoven's music, I could hear pain and joy, struggle and triumph, and those themes became even more powerful when I learned that Beethoven lost his hearing, and yet he kept composing all the way until his death.

As someone who's devoted my life to sound, I've always wondered, how did that loss affect Beethoven?

How did he compose music he could never hear?

I'd heard different stories over the years, but with any legendary figure, it's hard to separate the truth from the legend.

To begin to understand someone, the best place to start is with their own words.

Heiligenstadt, October 6th, 1802.

For my brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven to be read and executed after my death.

It's the autumn of 1802.

In a small Austrian town called Heiligenstadt.

Ludwig von Beethoven is at the height of his composing career at only 31 years old.

Now, his home is in the bustling city of Vienna, but for the last five months, at the recommendation of his doctor, he's been staying here in Heiligenstadt.

On October 6th, Beethoven sits down and writes a letter to his brothers.

Oh, you men, who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic?

How greatly do do you wrong me?

You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you.

For six years now, I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady, whose cure will take years or perhaps be impossible.

Beethoven's despair is clear in his words, and the thing that's agonizing him is that he's losing his hearing.

He's worried that he won't be able to compose anymore.

What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing.

Or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing.

Such incidents drove me almost to despair.

A little more of that, and I would have ended my life.

Beethoven never sent that letter.

It was only discovered years later after his death.

But what drove him to that point and how could he ever get past it?

Beethoven had quite a tumultuous upbringing.

That's Laura Tunbridge.

I'm a professor of music at the University of Oxford and author of Beethoven, A Life in Nine Pieces.

Beethoven was born in 1770 in the German city of Bonn.

His mother had seven children, four of whom died as infants.

His father was a musician and was also an alcoholic who was quite aggressive when drunk.

And a young Beethoven found that he had to really find his own way in the world and then also to look after his family.

At age five, his father started teaching him to play piano.

Beethoven's father wanted his son to be successful and I think wanted him to be more of a prodigy than he actually was.

For instance, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was 15 years older than Beethoven, was considered a prodigy by age six.

One of the early stories we have of Beethoven's childhood is of his father making his son seem younger than he was in order to sell him as a prodigy in the style of Mozart.

So, whilst Beethoven was a talented young musician, he wasn't quite of Mozart class.

Beethoven started his musical career as more of a performer than a composer.

He was a talented pianist who would play in church and in private performances for aristocrats.

In his early years, I think Beethoven primarily was writing for his own instrument, the piano.

This was music for him to play.

It wasn't necessarily music to be published that would be shared more widely, but was very much a showcase for him.

In his early 20s, Beethoven moves to Vienna to study with composer Joseph Haydn.

He finds a way into the aristocratic circles of Vienna and gradually finds himself working in genres such as piano sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, opera, choral music.

Slowly but surely, his reputation as a composer grows.

He starts publishing his compositions and getting more funding from wealthy backers.

People see him as the successor to Mozart, who had died when Beethoven was 20, but not everything in his life is going so well.

In 1801, Beethoven falls in love with one of his piano students, a young woman named Julie Guicciardi.

His moonlight sonata, which you're hearing right now, was dedicated to her.

But Julie ended up marrying another man.

It was a pattern that would happen several times throughout Beethoven's life.

Beethoven fell in and out of love quite rapidly as a young man, and quite often he was besotted with women who married other people.

But along with his romantic struggles, he also continually struggled with his health.

Beethoven suffered from a variety of ailments throughout his life.

His digestion was always an issue, and also as a young man, he suffered from asthma.

He had smallpox as a child, which left him with facial scarring.

In 2024, samples of Beethoven's hair were tested and they showed high levels of toxic lead.

In his 20s, it's believed he had typhoid fever, which would help explain the issue he's most known for, hearing loss.

From what we know, Beethoven began to experience hearing loss in his mid-20s from around the age of 26.

And it seems that he began to experience problems with his left ear

and to struggle with hearing higher pitches and words.

He also suffered from tinnitus

and also from what's called loudness recruitment.

Tinnitus is when a person hears a sound that doesn't come from anything in the real world.

It's often experienced as a continuous high-pitched ringing,

but it can also be perceived as a low buzz

or a hiss.

And it can come and go seemingly at random.

The other condition, called loudness recruitment, is where sounds are perceived as louder than they really are.

By his early 30s, he's beginning to talk about this to friends and also seeking medical advice.

And we have letters to friends admitting that he was struggling with his hearing.

That jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel.

And it amounts to this that for the last three years, my hearing has become weaker and weaker this is from a letter that Beethoven wrote to a close friend my ears are buzzing and ringing perpetually day and night I must confess that I lead a miserable life for almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions just because I find it impossible to say to people I am deaf In any other profession, this might be more tolerable, but in mine such a condition is truly frightful.

One of the doctors Beethoven was seeing recommended that he go away for a while, take some time out of the city, and rest in the country air.

That's what brings him to Heiligenstadt, the small town where he writes that anguished letter to his brothers.

It became known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

It's a long letter that in some ways serves as a will.

It's explaining to them that the reason he's been so difficult and unsociable is because of his hearing loss.

And he discusses the trauma that's causing him.

No longer can I enjoy recreation in social intercourse, refined conversation, or mutual outpourings of thought.

Completely isolated, I only enter society when compelled to do so.

I must live like an exile.

In company, I am assailed by the most painful apprehensions, from the dread of being exposed to the risk of my condition being observed.

But then begins to explain how, despite all of this, he still determined to carry on living and to carry on composing and devoting his life to music.

It was only my art that held me back.

Ah,

it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce.

And so I endured this wretched existence.

The art that held Beethoven back from going over the edge would be some of the deepest, most groundbreaking music in history, like his third symphony, also known as the Heroica Symphony, meaning heroic.

Beethoven started composing it right around the time he wrote that letter.

It's often discussed as being a piece that marks the beginning of what's called his heroic style or his middle period.

And there is a sense in the symphony that he's breaking new ground in terms of taking a conventional form and making it more dynamic, more dramatic.

Dramatic dynamics are a signature feature of Beethoven's music.

The loud sections are very loud, and the quiet parts are very quiet.

And they're often right next to each other.

One thing that really helps us get to the experience of music for Beethoven as somebody who's struggling with his hearing is actually the sounds that he asks instruments to make.

And so really extreme contrasts and dynamics can be ways in which you think, well actually if this is at the edge of your hearing, what do you think that music is trying to do?

Or if you have really loud passages, how does that respond to a visceral experience that one might have of sound?

The third symphony was radical for a lot of reasons.

At 50 minutes, it was longer than any symphony before it.

It did things with rhythm and harmony that no one else had even tried before.

Beethoven originally dedicated it to Napoleon, but then retracted that dedication when he learned that Napoleon had declared himself an emperor.

But to me, the thing that's most impressive about this piece is is the sheer musical power that it brings out of an orchestra.

You can imagine Beethoven standing in the center of these musicians, feeling the sound waves vibrate through his body and all the way up through the rafters.

The Eroica Symphony helped solidify Beethoven's place as one of the greats, like Bach and Mozart.

But for him, it was getting harder and harder to make this music.

We know that he began to struggle to hear some of the higher-pitched wind instruments in rehearsal.

So it's also a way in which you can think about how Beethoven's medical situation begins to impact his professional life.

But Beethoven was determined to keep making music.

So he started experimenting with unique inventions to work around his hearing loss.

And this is where the fact and fiction around Beethoven really starts to blur.

That's coming up, after after the break.

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By the start of the 19th century, Ludwig von Beethoven had become one of the most famous composers composers in Europe.

He had taken the mantle from Mozart and Haydn and was revolutionizing what orchestras could do.

At the same time, he was dealing with a profound personal struggle.

His hearing was getting worse and worse, making him anxious, withdrawn, and unable to connect with people.

But his passion for music kept him going.

One of the interesting things about Beethoven's hearing loss, despite all of the distress it obviously caused him, was that he was still determined to compose.

He never really considers giving up composing and making music.

He knows that he has to find a way to work around his hearing loss to do so.

So Beethoven started trying different things to mitigate his hearing loss.

For communication, he started carrying around what he called conversation books.

These were notebooks where people would write down what they wanted to say to him and he would respond using his voice.

Beethoven from 1818 conducted a number of conversations through these notebooks so we have one-sided conversations remaining where we can tell the subject of conversations that Beethoven was having with various visitors and friends and family.

When it came to composing, Beethoven could draw from a deep knowledge of musical theory.

This meant that he could write out ideas away from the piano and still hear them in his head.

He also learned to rely on the physical sensation of music.

When he would improvise for hours on the piano, he had a sense of when the music felt right under his fingers and he could feel when the instrument was resonating the way he wanted it to.

One of the things I find really compelling about some of the work on Beethoven's later music is the dependence on vibration, on the tactile experience of instruments that might in some ways be sensed within, say, the late piano sonatas.

There are also accounts of Beethoven sitting in the middle of a string quartet as they rehearsed a new piece he had written.

It's not necessarily that he can hear everything, but he can tell from gestures and following the score and his musical knowledge what's in time, where a fingering won't work, how something might come together in a more synchronous way.

You can tell that he's still very much in the inner workings of his music.

But Beethoven also looked for help in the latest technologies.

As he's losing his hearing, he is somebody who is always interested in inventions.

And amongst them is an idea of using ear trumpets.

An ear trumpet is a handheld metal tube.

It has a small hole at one end for your ear and a large open cone at the other end for sound to come in.

These are basically like reverse megaphones, so they collect and direct sounds to the listener.

We know that Beethoven had a collection of these of different scales in terms of size.

Some he could wear via a headband so that he could have his hands free whilst he played at the piano.

Beethoven was also at the forefront of keyboard technology.

Piano makers in England and France would send their latest models directly to him.

Some of these featured larger hammers and thicker soundboards, which is what amplifies the sound of vibrating strings.

The result was louder, more resonant pianos.

And then, later on in 1820,

the piano maker Andre Stein worked with Beethoven on creating what's translated as a hearing machine.

The exact hearing machine that Stein built has been lost to history, but there are some clues about what it looked like.

Some of these come from the writings that Stein left in Beethoven's conversation books.

For instance, there were some early ideas of a wooden box box with a couple of horns pointed at the player's ears.

In the end, they settled on a kind of arched tube over the body of the piano, with the open end pointing towards Beethoven.

Basically a half dome that's put over a keyboard so that you can capture more of the sound and more of the vibrations of the instruments.

In 2017, a group of researchers at the Orpheus Institute in Belgium built several replicas of Beethoven's hearing machine.

According to researchers, the hearing machine produced an overall volume boost of about 3 to 4 decibels.

That's about 23 to 32 percent higher in perceived volume.

It also boosted frequencies down around 125 Hz

and up around 4000 Hz.

Over the years, there have been lots of stories about the things Beethoven did to cope with his hearing loss.

One of these showed up in the 1995 film Mr.

Holland's Opus, starring Richard Dreyfus.

In the movie, Dreyfus plays a high school music teacher whose son is born deaf.

In one scene, he addresses his class as Beethoven's Seventh Symphony plays in the background.

There is a story

that

in order to write his music, Beethoven literally sawed the legs off his piano so that he could lay the body flat on the ground

and then

he would lay down on the ground next to the piano with his ear pressed to the floor

and he would pound the keys with his fingers

in order to hear his music through the vibrations

of the floor

it's a great story but there's not much evidence that it happened exactly like that.

However, several people who who knew Beethoven wrote about him pressing his ear against the piano while he played, especially to hear the high notes.

About 60 years after Beethoven's death, a doctor in France made another interesting claim.

He wrote that Beethoven would attach one end of a wooden drumstick to his piano and hold the other end between his teeth as he played.

This would allow the piano's vibrations to travel through his teeth into his inner ears via bone conduction.

If this is true, it's brilliant.

But again, there isn't much evidence for it.

Another well-known story is set on the premiere night of Beethoven's ninth and final symphony.

The premiere took place on May 7th, 1824, at a prestigious theater in Vienna.

It had been over a decade since Beethoven had published a symphony, or even performed piano in public.

By that point, it was well known that he was completely deaf, which only added to the anticipation.

While Beethoven was officially billed as the conductor that night, there was another conductor on stage next to him, who the musicians were told to follow.

According to the story, when the music ended,

Beethoven kept conducting, not knowing they were finished.

Then, one of the singers tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned around and saw the audience giving a huge standing ovation.

According to Laura, this one probably isn't too far off.

Now, it seems from other accounts of the premiere that actually it was after the Scherzo movement that Beethoven was tapped on the shoulder.

That's a little less than halfway through.

At that point, perhaps nobody would have expected applause in the middle of the symphony.

So you can tell that in this challenging premiere environment, you have Beethoven standing next to the conductor, something of a distraction, and himself lost in the music, then being turned around to realize how appreciative the audience have been.

The Ninth Symphony would be one of Beethoven's last compositions.

He was 53 years old, and his health was rapidly declining.

Beethoven suffered from a variety of illnesses throughout his life, and these increased through the 1820s.

It seems that he suffered, in the end, primarily from liver disease.

And after a summer of relative happiness and productivity in 1826, he became ill, returned to Vienna, took to his bed, and spent the last few months there until he died in March 1827.

Beethoven's funeral was a huge procession through the streets of Vienna.

Around 10,000 people attended.

During the procession, they performed pieces by Mozart, Schubert, and this trombone piece by Beethoven himself.

Almost immediately after his death, the myth around Beethoven started to grow.

And this only increased with the discovery of unsent letters like the Heiligenstadt Testament, as well as a love letter to someone he called the Immortal Beloved.

Beethoven came of age in some ways during a time when myths about great men were particularly popular.

It's the period when Romantic authors are really blurring the divide between life and art.

And Beethoven in some ways becomes the composer who most obviously embodies that that because he has a personal struggle to overcome in order to create great works.

And then we have the alluring combination of a lot of documentation about Beethoven's life and a lot of gaps.

We can only imagine what Beethoven's fate would have been if he were around today.

He might be using state-of-the-art hearing aids powered by AI.

Or he might get surgery to get a cochlear implant, which can stimulate the auditory nerve directly.

But of course, he didn't have access to any of that.

And yet, even after the world around him faded to silence, Beethoven kept creating.

The passion that fueled him just wouldn't let him stop.

And those creations stand as some of the most beautiful, timeless pieces of music ever composed.

So, the possibility of imagining yourself into the mind of a composer who can't hear, of somebody who's often in love but never marries, of somebody who overcomes all kinds of difficulties in order to create.

All of these things are immensely attractive to writers, to listeners.

They allow a way into the music, but also encourage us to think imaginatively about what it must be to create.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Daniel Seymour and Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East, it was sound designed and mixed by Graham Gold and Colin DeVarney.

Thanks to our guest, Laura Tunbridge.

Laura's book is called Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces.

You can get it wherever books are sold, and it's also available as an audiobook.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.