Everyone knows that Beethoven, one of the greatest composers of all time, was increasingly deaf over the last years of his life. There is the poignant scene of him conducting his final symphony in 1824 into which he had poured sounds he could only hear in his own head. At the end he stands looking at his orchestra feeling that the music has been a failure. Then, one of the orchestra members gently turns him around so that he can see the overwhelming applause coming from the audience, who were on their feet cheering. They had recognizeed something truly spectacular, something that would be played over and over for all the years that followed.
What everyone may not know was that Beethoven was a gifted pianist, and as his deafness grew, he still insisted on playing concerts with terrible results. He had to pound so loudly to be able to hear the notes himself, that the music was destroyed. One friend commented that the only thing that kept him from taking his life as the deafness increased was “moral rectitude.” He was devastated by his loss.
By the last decade of his life Beethoven’s hearing loss was so complete that his music could only reside in his imagination. It was then that he wrote the soaring music that would define him to the generations to come. It would change music permanently and give him his lasting legacy. He was freed from what he thought was his only identity into something new and special. He himself probably did not appreciate the artistic freedom that his deafness granted him, as he still mourned the loss of his career as an accomplished pianist. However, it is of significance that his final symphony ends with lines from a Friedrich Schiller poem Ode to Joy: “Joy! A spark of fire from heaven.
May all of us of a certain age find in the coming years, ways in which our current life can set us free from what we felt defined us when we were younger. There can be a final symphony for us all.