| David Finckel and Eugene Drucker explain the impact of Beethoven’s deafness on his late works. (3:21) |  |
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No discussion of Beethoven—and certainly no division of his work into early, middle, and late periods—can avoid the subject of his deafness and its effects on his work. Perhaps as important as the depression and subsequent acceptance (most graphically outlined in contrast between the tumultuous Fifth Symphony and the pastoral Sixth) would be the effect of no longer being able to hear his work as he wrote it. Confined in an aural world completely of his own imagination, that imagination would take his music to new and ever-greater heights, creating a hitherto unimagined world of musical possibility in the process.
An excerpt from the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter that Beethoven wrote to his brothers in 1802 in response to his advancing deafness:
O my fellow man, who consider me, or describe me as unfriendly, peevish, or even misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. For you do not know the secret reason why I appear to you to be so … But just think for the last six years I have been afflicted with an incurable complaint which has been made worse by incompetent doctors. From year to year my hopes of being cured have gradually been shattered and finally I have been forced to accept the prospect of a permanent infirmity (the curing of which may perhaps take years or may even prove to be impossible). Though endowed with a passionate and lively temperament and even fond of the distractions offered by society, I was soon obliged to seclude myself and live in solitude … I could not bring myself to say to people: “Speak up, shout, for I am deaf.” Alas! how could I possibly refer to the impairing of a sense which in me should be more perfectly developed than in other people …
From Beethoven Letters, Journals, and Conversations, edited, translated, and introduced by Michael Hamburger (Pantheon, 1852)
Beethoven continued to be involved in making music even after his deafness was very advanced. Violinist Joseph Böhm, a member of the quartet chosen to premiere Op. 127, recalls a moment in rehearsal for the piece:
A rehearsal in his presence was still no easy matter. With unbroken attention, his eyes would follow the bow, from which he could discern even the slightest unsteadiness in tempo or rhythm, and could correct it immediately. It was this quartet that had a meno vivace at the end, which seemed to me to weaken the effect of the whole. I therefore recommended that at the rehearsal, the tempo should remain unchanged at that point, which was done, and which indeed did make a better impression. Beethoven, meanwhile, crouched in a corner, not hearing it at all, but watching with unbroken attention. Then, after the final stroke of the bow, he said laconically, “Can stay that way,” went to the music stand, and crossed out the meno vivace in all four parts. The quartet was finally performed, and was received with a veritable storm of applause.
From Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, revised and edited by Elliot Forbes (Princeton, 1967)
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