Deaf and Definite Death
The Cutting Silence of Beethoven’s Genius
J. Y. Gao
AS ONE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC’S FIRST FREELANCE COMPOSERS, BEETHOVEN’S STYLISTIC VOICE BEGAN ITS JOURNEY OF GROWTH EARLY. Whilst other contemporary composers made a living subscribing to the musical taste of wealthy patrons and high-class aristocrats, Beethoven wrote music for himself and the people. As a result, the world was blessed with the spectacular range of instrumentation, pitch, and colour of Beethoven; the boundaryless career choice allowed him to fully adopt the full force of the Romantic era, instilling in his music the raw expression of his musical imagination, and bringing together the unprecedented potential of his experimentation. Gifted with perfect pitch of the highest order, Beethoven’s talents as a musician, a composer and an artist, shot him to fame on the world’s biggest musical stage: Vienna. But by the age of 26, his blossoming career seemed to reach an impregnable impasse.
Beethoven’s deafness was top-down; it started at the top of the audible spectrum, and made its way down to the lower-end. By the time Beethoven noticed his deafness at the age of 26, as evident in his letters and diary entries, his deafness was estimated to be equivalent to someone at the age of 80. Indeed, this discovery was met with great anxiety; a musician’s greatest tool now transformed into a source of torment, frailing and failing more by the months.
“Yet it was impossible for me to say to people: speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. How could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense that ought to be more perfect in me than others. A sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed.” – from Beethoven’s diary
As tinnitus also began to set in, an impending, inevitable end approached like a screeching freight train in the distance.
This desperate panic that Beethoven descended into gave way to his most famous piece, the 5th Symphony. Having been started by Beethoven at an age of 34, the piece’s fateful rhythmic pattern of three short beats followed by a long extended note (described phonetically by the well-known onomatopoeia Dun Dun Dun Dunnnnnn) resembled knocks on a door, and a momentary stillness ushering doom. With the powerful and visceral motif established, Beethoven moves through a landscape of notes and sounds, colours and images, all the whilst keeping the fate motif alive and echoing underneath. The four notes are passed around the orchestra like a whisper, through different intervals, registers, and tone colours, growing louder at every bar line and every phrase. Like the looming darkness that clouded Beethoven’s mind, the building music forebode a thunderous end. Utilising the extended tonal range of the orchestra with the addition of contrabassoon, trombone and piccolo, Beethoven’s 1st movement ends in a roar of anguish.
Of course, Beethoven’s message isn’t entirely pessimistic; as the symphony neared its last movement, it was evident that a great musical arc is about to reach its final destination. Sure enough, the triumphant 4th movement starts with what many consider the greatest moment in classical music. This agonising process that dragged the music through Beethoven’s raw emotionality changed the tone from a sombre C minor to a heroic C major. Battling with the anguish of his hearing loss, Beethoven’s thunderous and repeating rhythm gave birth to a victorious and hopeful end. Thus, Beethoven’s ‘dun dun dun dunnnnn’ is more than a symbol of dismay and pain; it is a sign of the powerful human spirit. Coincidentally, the rhythm spelled out the letter ‘V’ in morse code, and was thus used as the code for victory amongst allies in WW2.
But, of course, Beethoven has yet faced the end of his auditory degradation. As his hearing deteriorated, we heard his music move further and further down the registers. Soon, at the age of 46, Beethoven had gone completely deaf. It seemed to many that Beethoven’s career may have reached its end, an unfair talent cut down by the justice of nature’s balancing scale.
Yet, as a sign of his artistic resilience and passionate worldview, Beethoven’s music flipped its downwards trajectory, and opened up to the full range of musical pitch and colour we most associate with his style. It seems as though Beethoven’s deafness forced him to let go of the low and limited pitches he had desperately tried to hold on to, and unleashed, once again, the full magnitude of his musical imagination. Perfect pitch, which is the ability to imagine distinct notes intuitively, like the way one might imagine the colour green, usually breaks down after the age of 50; by the age of 60, people with perfect pitch would have lost their talent completely. Of course, Beethoven’s perfect pitch stayed steady. With what one can only describe as unparalleled genius and dedication, Beethoven began his ninth and final symphony at the age of 53, having lived a decade in complete deafness and roaring tinnitus.
As any artist would know, the process of creation, especially of something as complex and multi-faceted as an orchestral score, every detail matters. Every phrase, instrumentation, and pitch is considered and accounted for – it is impossible not to. When one decides which note to use, how can it be possible, with the goal of perfection and legacy in mind, that one chooses it randomly; when one decides which instrument to play the note, how is it possible to not think about the decision. This process stayed true with Beethoven, except that every choice that he made was imagined; every note imagined, every phrase imagined, every harmony imagined, every tone colour imagined. It is rare even for a person who are musically trained ears to hear each individual layer/line within a symphonic piece, yet Beethoven’s mental capacity allowed him to generate and hold in his head every single layer of his music.
Beethoven’s ninth wielded melodies as famous as ‘Ode to Joy’ which one might argue is equivalent in fame as his ‘dun dun dun dunnnnn’. Many critics have claimed the ninth symphony was Beethoven’s best and most comprehensive work. It is a piece that encapsulates his years of experience, including the times of pain and the times of joy; a final tribute to the beauty of the world.
The roaring silent world of tinnitus and deafness evokes a world of death and tragedy, yet Beethoven’s music showed that the world he lived in was anything but silent or mundane; it was a world full of life, of joy, and of music. His passion for this life and his embracing of its chaos has modelled perhaps the most authentic tribute to what it means to be human.