Ludwig van Beethoven: the deaf composer who remade music

By the Magna Bureau Encyclopedia Desk

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is the composer who carried Western music from the classical balance of Haydn and Mozart into something larger, stormier and more personal. He wrote nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, five piano concertos, one opera and the Missa Solemnis. He did much of it while going deaf, and his last great works, the Ninth Symphony, the late quartets and the final piano sonatas, were composed in near-total silence. Beethoven turned the composer from a servant of courts and churches into an artist who answered to his own conscience, and music has never gone back.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne, into a family of court musicians. His grandfather had been Kapellmeister, the head of music at the Elector's court, and his father Johann was a singer there. The exact date of his birth is unknown; he was baptized on 17 December 1770, and that date is the one the world marks. His father, ambitious and fond of drink, saw the boy's talent early and pushed him hard, hoping to produce a second Mozart. The young Ludwig practised long hours, wept at the keyboard, and learned the violin, the organ and the piano before he was ten.

Bonn gave him more than drill. The court of the Elector Maximilian Franz was unusually enlightened, with a good orchestra, a theatre and a university. The boy played viola in the court orchestra from his early teens, and he met musicians who widened his world: the violinist Karl Amenda, the composer and teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, who published the twelve-year-old's first works and wrote that the boy would surely become a second Mozart if he continued as he had begun. Neefe taught him Bach, and the young Beethoven absorbed the counterpoint of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a foundation that would return, transformed, in the fugues of his last years.

Two experiences in Bonn shaped the man. The first was the death of his mother Maria Magdalena in 1787, when he was sixteen, an event that left him, as the eldest surviving child, responsible for his younger brothers and for a father sinking into alcoholism. The second was the arrival of the ideas of the French Revolution, which reached Bonn through books, travellers and the university. The young Beethoven admired the Revolution's promise of human dignity and freedom, an admiration that would later curdle when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Bonn was a small city, but it gave Beethoven discipline, Bach, responsibility and ideals. When he left for Vienna in November 1792, he carried all four with him.

Vienna in 1792 was the musical capital of Europe, and Beethoven arrived with letters of introduction and a reputation as a formidable pianist. He came to study with Joseph Haydn, then the most famous composer alive, and he stayed for the rest of his life. The lessons with Haydn were not a complete success: Beethoven, already strong-willed, thought Haydn careless as a teacher, and quietly took extra lessons in counterpoint from Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. But Vienna offered what Bonn could not: aristocratic patrons who paid him to compose, published his works, and treated a musician as something more than a liveried servant.

Within a few years Beethoven was the most talked-about pianist in Vienna. His improvisations at salons and in competitions astonished listeners; one famous contest with the visiting virtuoso Daniel Steibelt ended with Beethoven taking Steibelt's own theme and improvising on it so brilliantly that Steibelt refused ever to meet him again. The piano sonatas of this period, including the Pathetique of 1798-1799 and the Moonlight Sonata of 1801, showed a new kind of writing: music that used dynamics, silence and sudden contrast to create drama, not just decoration. The First and Second Symphonies followed, respectful of Haydn's models but already restless, with jokes, surprises and a scale that hinted at bigger things.

Beethoven's patrons mattered enormously. Prince Lichnowsky, Count Razumovsky, the Archduke Rudolph, who became his pupil, patron and friend, and a circle of aristocrats paid him annual stipends so that he could compose without a court post. This arrangement was new. Earlier composers had been employees. Beethoven was closer to a free artist, and he behaved like one: he argued with princes, refused to play on command, and insisted that his music be taken seriously. He also began to keep notebooks, sketchbooks in which ideas were worked over for months or years. The sketches show a composer who laboured, who rejected dozens of versions of a theme before accepting one, and who built his works the way an architect builds a cathedral: slowly, from foundations up.

Around 1798, when Beethoven was in his late twenties and at the height of his powers as a performer, he began to notice a ringing and buzzing in his ears. His hearing faded gradually, worse in conversation than in music, and no treatment of the time helped: doctors prescribed cold baths, almond oil, galvanic shocks and isolation in the countryside. He hid the condition for years, dreading that it would end his career, and the effort of pretending to hear in company made him withdrawn, suspicious and, to many, rude. The man who had been the life of the salon became the man who walked alone, shouting in conversation books that friends would later use to talk to him.

In October 1802, staying in the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna on his doctor's advice, Beethoven wrote a document he never sent: the Heiligenstadt Testament, addressed to his brothers Carl and Johann. In it he described his despair, his temptation to end his life, and the one thing that held him back: his art. He wrote that it seemed impossible to leave the world until he had produced all that he felt was inside him. The Testament is one of the most moving documents in the history of music, not because it is a suicide note, but because it is a vow. Beethoven chose to live for his work, and the works that followed the Testament were different: larger, harder, more defiant.

The Third Symphony, the Eroica, written in 1803 and 1804, is the first fruit of that decision. Originally dedicated to Napoleon, whom Beethoven admired as the heir of the Revolution, the dedication was furiously scratched out when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. Beethoven is said to have cried out that Napoleon was nothing more than an ordinary man who would trample on the rights of humanity. The Eroica, at roughly twice the length of any symphony before it, with a funeral march as its slow movement, announced that the symphony could now carry the weight of a novel or an epic. The classical symphony had become a public statement about heroism, death and endurance.

The decade from 1803 to about 1812 is often called Beethoven's heroic or middle period, and it produced an astonishing run of works: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Razumovsky quartets, the opera Fidelio, and the Emperor Concerto. The Fifth Symphony, premiered in a freezing hall in December 1808 alongside the Sixth, the Choral Fantasy and parts of the Mass in C, opens with four notes that have become the most famous motif in music: short, short, short, long. Beethoven builds an entire symphony from that fragment, driving it through struggle to a blazing C major finale. The Sixth, the Pastoral, is its opposite: a portrait of the countryside Beethoven loved, with bird calls, a thunderstorm and a shepherd's song of thanks after the storm.

Fidelio, his only opera, tells the story of Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her husband Florestan from a political prison. Beethoven revised it repeatedly across three versions, in 1805, 1806 and 1814, and the final version became a hymn to marital loyalty and freedom from tyranny. Its prison scene and its trumpet call of liberation carry the same message as the Eroica: that human dignity survives the dungeon. The opera was never a popular success in Beethoven's lifetime, but its overture and its final chorus remain among his most performed pages, and its theme of rescue from unjust imprisonment has kept it alive in every era of political oppression since.

These were also years of personal turbulence. In 1808 Beethoven nearly accepted a well-paid post in Kassel, and his Viennese patrons responded by guaranteeing him an annual income to stay. In 1812 he wrote the famous unsent letter to his Immortal Beloved, whose identity scholars still debate. And by 1812 his hearing had deteriorated so far that he largely gave up performing in public. The last public appearance as a pianist came in 1814. From then on Beethoven composed for an audience he could barely hear, relying on the inner ear he had trained since childhood, on the piano's vibrations, and on a wooden rod held between his teeth and pressed to the piano to conduct sound to his skull.

The years from about 1815 to 1827 were, by any ordinary measure, a period of misery. Beethoven was totally deaf, quarrelling with his brother's widow over the custody of his nephew Karl, ill with liver disease and dropsy, and increasingly isolated. His output slowed. For several years he wrote little, and some in Vienna wondered whether his powers had faded. Then, in the last five years of his life, came a burst of creation unlike anything in music: the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last five piano sonatas and the last five string quartets, works that musicians still describe as the summit of the art.

The Ninth Symphony, premiered on 7 May 1824, ends with a chorus singing Schiller's Ode to Joy, a poem Beethoven had wanted to set since his youth. A deaf composer stood on the podium, beating time, and had to be turned around by one of the singers to see the applause he could not hear. The Ninth changed what a symphony could be: it admitted voices, it set a text about universal brotherhood, and it made the finale a public declaration rather than a polite conclusion. Its melody has since become the anthem of the European Union, the hymn of countless movements for freedom, and the piece most often played to mark the fall of walls and the opening of new eras.

The late string quartets, written between 1825 and 1826, go further still. The Quartet in C sharp minor, Opus 131, is played without a break, seven movements flowing into one another like a single argument. The Grosse Fuge, originally the finale of the Quartet in B flat, Opus 130, is a fugue so fierce and so modern that audiences at the premiere found it incomprehensible; Stravinsky would later call it an absolutely contemporary work that would be contemporary forever. The last piano sonatas, especially Opus 109, 110 and 111, dissolve the sonata into song and variation, ending in a stillness that sounds like peace after struggle. Beethoven died on 26 March 1827, during a thunderstorm, after weeks of illness. His funeral in Vienna drew thousands of mourners, and schools closed for the day.

Beethoven changed the status of the composer. Before him, composers were mostly craftsmen in service to a court, a church or an opera house, and their music was expected to please. Beethoven demanded to be heard on his own terms, and he made audiences accept works that were longer, harder and more demanding than anything before. He also changed the scale of music: the symphony grew from a half-hour entertainment into an hour-long statement; the string quartet became a vehicle for the most serious thought a composer could express; the piano sonata became a confessional. Later composers, from Schubert and Berlioz to Brahms and Wagner, measured themselves against him, and Brahms famously waited years before daring to publish a first symphony, knowing the world would call it Beethoven's Tenth.

His influence reaches beyond concert halls. The idea that an artist can be deaf and still create, that suffering can be transformed into work that outlives it, has made Beethoven a figure of world culture, not only of music. His image appears on stamps and banknotes, his birthday concerts fill halls on every continent, and the Ode to Joy is sung in languages he never knew. The details of his life continue to be debated by scholars, from the cause of his deafness to the identity of the Immortal Beloved. What is not debated is the music. Two centuries after his death, it still sounds like a man insisting, against silence itself, that joy is possible and that freedom is worth the struggle.

• 1770 – Baptized on 17 December in Bonn, in the Electorate of Cologne, into a family of court musicians.
• 1782 – Christian Gottlob Neefe publishes the young Beethoven's first works and predicts a great future.
• 1787 – His mother dies; the sixteen-year-old takes responsibility for his younger brothers. A short visit to Vienna brings a brief meeting with Mozart.
• 1792 – Moves to Vienna to study with Haydn, after the Elector's court and patrons support the journey. He never lives in Bonn again.
• 1795 – First public performance in Vienna as a pianist, playing one of his own piano concertos.
• 1798 – Hearing trouble begins: ringing in the ears and fading conversation. The Pathetique Sonata appears.
• 1801 – The Moonlight Sonata is published; Beethoven confesses his deafness to friends in letters.
• 1802 – Writes the Heiligenstadt Testament, a private vow to live for his art despite despair over his deafness.
• 1804 – The Eroica Symphony is completed; the dedication to Napoleon is scratched out after the coronation.
• 1808 – The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies premiere together in Vienna on a famously long and cold December evening.
• 1814 – The final version of Fidelio is staged; Beethoven makes his last public appearance as a pianist.
• 1822 – Begins the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, composing in total deafness.
• 1824 – Premiere of the Ninth Symphony on 7 May in Vienna; the deaf composer is turned to see the applause.
• 1826 – Completes the last string quartets, including the C sharp minor Quartet and the Grosse Fuge.
• 1827 – Dies in Vienna on 26 March during a thunderstorm. Thousands attend his funeral.

Beethoven's legacy is double. Musically, he is the bridge between the classical and romantic eras and the composer against whom every later symphonist was measured. Brahms, Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all wrote in his shadow, and the late quartets and piano sonatas remain the hardest test of any performer's depth. Culturally, he became the model of the artist as an independent moral voice, answerable to conscience rather than to patrons or fashion.

The Ode to Joy, the finale of the Ninth, has travelled further than any other piece of concert music: it is the anthem of the European Union, a hymn at Olympic ceremonies, and a song of protest and celebration from Chile to Japan. Beethoven's life is also a standing answer to the idea that disability ends creativity. He composed his greatest music when he could no longer hear it, and the world still listens.

• Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (Schirmer, 1977; revised 1998), the standard modern biography, including the deafness and the Heiligenstadt Testament.
• Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (W. W. Norton, 2003), a biography centred on the works and the sketchbooks.
• Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), a full narrative life of the composer.
• The Beethoven-Haus Bonn, the composer's birthplace museum and research centre, and its digitized sketchbooks and letters.
• The Vienna Philharmonic and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, custodians of the autograph scores and first-edition records.
• Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford University Press, 2000), in the Master Musicians series, on the works and chronology.
• William Kinderman, Beethoven (University of California Press, 1995; revised 2009), on the creative process and the late style.
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, entry on Beethoven, for the catalogue of works and dates.