“Buzzing and ringing day and night”
Beethoven and hearing loss “Buzzing and ringing day and night” Beethoven and hearing loss

Beethoven’s Second Symphony sounds strikingly optimistic, despite being composed during a time of existential crisis. As he wrote it, the composer confronted the onset of hearing loss, the greatest tragedy of his life.

In 1792, at the age of 22, Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn and moved to Vienna, where he would spend the rest of his life. The young artist soon felt at home in the Habsburg capital, and planned to establish himself there as an independent musician. It was a bold gamble. Barely two years after his move, he found himself without a steady income, as the Electoral Court in Bonn, where he had been employed, stopped paying him. Prince Lichnowsky supported Beethoven from the very beginning and provided him with temporary lodging, but it was not until 1809 that he received an annual pension from a triumvirate of high-ranking noble patrons (Archduke Rudolph, Prince Lobkowitz, and Prince Kinsky).

Beethoven intended to build his artistic career on two pillars: as a freelance composer and as a touring piano virtuoso. Around the turn of the century, however, he began to notice the first signs of an impending catastrophe. In the summer of 1801, Beethoven confided in two close friends about his struggle – he was losing his hearing. In addition to no longer being able to perceive certain frequencies, he was also plagued by a constant “buzzing and ringing day and night”, and loud noises in particular caused him physical pain. Being hard of hearing – for a musician, unthinkable: “For almost two years I have avoided all company because I find it impossible to say to people that I am deaf.” 

Concealing the illness

Exactly when and how the affliction began remains unknown; at least initially, even close associates such as his pupil and colleague Carl Czerny and the conductor Ignaz von Seyfried noticed nothing amiss. Beethoven told one of his friends that his “hearing had grown steadily weaker over the past three years”, particularly in his left ear. The autopsy could not fully clarify the causes; however, the culprit was likely nerve atrophy, that is, the degeneration or death of the auditory nerves.

At first, Beethoven tried to conceal his condition from those around him; only a select few were let in on the secret. His student Ferdinand Ries describes the period around 1802, when Beethoven completed his Second Symphony: “The onset of deafness was such a sensitive matter for him that one had to be very careful not to make him feel this deficiency by speaking more loudly. If he failed to understand something, he would usually attribute it to his absent-mindedness, which was, admittedly, a trait he possessed to a greater degree.” In the beginning, the hearing loss seems to have had little effect on Beethoven’s composing; however, he had to give up his career as a performer.

A decade later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted that the composer’s “hearing was leaving him, which perhaps harms the musical part of his nature less than the social.” It was not until much later, in the works of his final years, that sonic harshness and an uncompromising treatment of voice leading became apparent. To attribute these qualities solely to his inability to hear would be an oversimplification. Already after 1800, Beethoven had indeed wanted to pursue a “different path” because, according to Czerny, he had been “only slightly satisfied” with his previous works; in the Piano Sonatas op. 31, composed around the same time as the Second Symphony, “the partial fulfilment of this decision” is evident.

Despair and resignation to fate

When Beethoven finished the score of his Second Symphony, he almost immediately committed to paper the so-called “Heiligenstadt Testament,” a harrowing document – oscillating between despair and defiance – in which he described his situation with unflinching honesty. Free from the need to consider specific recipients, as in the aforementioned confessional letters, he admitted to having contemplated suicide: “What humiliation when someone stood beside me and 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 and I would have put an end to my life – it was only art that held me back; alas, it seemed impossible to me to leave the world before I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.”

Here a new guiding principle emerges – the overcoming of external adversity in the service of one’s predestined task as an artist. A decade later, he would formulate this maxim in his diary thus: “Resignation, the most profound resignation to your fate! Only this can provide the sacrifice required by your calling.”

Ear trumpets and conversation books

Meanwhile, the illness progressed; at times it improved, at times it worsened, but overall it was a downward spiral. Burdensome treatments provided only temporary relief. In 1804, Beethoven could no longer hear the wind instruments during a rehearsal; in 1813, he asked Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (the inventor of the metronome) to make him a hearing trumpet and Johann Andreas Streicher to create funnel attachments for the piano. Around 1817, according to Czerny, Beethoven’s deafness became “so severe that he could no longer hear music at all”, and in 1818 he began communicating with visitors in writing, using the so-called conversation notebooks, in which his interlocutors recorded their side of the exchange. By 1824, he had completely lost his hearing. When applause erupted after the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the contralto soloist Caroline Unger turned him toward the audience so that he could at least see their enthusiasm.