Beethoven: I will seize fate by the throat

What is the cruellest thing that can happen to a musician? Take away his hearing.

It happened to Beethoven. From the age of twenty-six his ears began to fail. First he could not make out the high notes. Then came a ringing that never stopped. Then sound itself began to ebb out of his world, note by note, as a tide goes out. He went to every doctor he could find, soaked in hot springs, had herbs pressed against his skin. None of it worked.

He was the most dazzling musician in Europe at the time; when he played the piano, a whole hall stopped breathing. And the script fate handed him read: you will live by sound, and then you will not hear sound.

At the lowest point he wrote a will. In 1802, taking the cure in the small town of Heiligenstadt, he wrote his brothers a long letter. It is full of pain and leave-taking. His illness, he wrote, had ruined everything. He had come close to ending his own life. The letter was never sent. It is known now as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

At the end of it, the pen turns. "It was art that held me back," he wrote. "Before I had brought forth all that I felt within me, I could not leave this world."

He set the despair to music. After that came the Eroica, and then the Fifth — the symphony we call Fate. Those four notes at the opening have been known ever since as fate knocking at the door; the whole world can hum them. He had already declared it in writing: I will seize fate by the throat. It shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.

What came next is harder to believe. His hearing kept deteriorating. In his last years he was almost entirely deaf. And in that complete silence he wrote the Ninth Symphony — the one that ends with the Ode to Joy, one of the most enormous works in the history of music.

The Ninth premiered in 1824, and Beethoven stood on the podium and conducted it himself. He could not hear the orchestra. When the piece ended, the hall behind him came apart with noise, and he did not know. A young singer walked over and gently turned him by the sleeve, and only then did he see the applause, the storm of it, the handkerchiefs waving in the air. People wept. A man who could not hear applause had written the music the world most wanted to applaud.

Fate closed one door on him. He pulled down the whole wall and put in a window for the human race.

He never married. His last years were lonely and poor, and much of his energy went into a bitter fight over guardianship of his nephew. Once he was deaf, conversation was carried on in conversation books — small notebooks he took everywhere, in which other people wrote and he answered. More than a hundred of them survive. They hold household matters, music, and his complaints, large and small. Read them and you find that the late Beethoven was not gloomy at all. He worried about the price of bread. He grumbled about his landlord. He advised friends on their political troubles. A man who had lost his hearing tied himself to the world with a pen.

He died in Vienna in March 1827, at fifty-seven. On the day of the funeral twenty thousand people filled the streets and the schools closed. The eulogy said his life had been a passage through suffering to joy — the very words he had written as a note to the first movement of the Fifth, which turned out to be the story of his own life.

Today the Ode to Joy is the anthem of an international organization and rings out in concert halls everywhere. When you hear that melody, remember where it came from: a man who could no longer hear it. He took the slap fate gave him and scored it for the whole human race to sing.