The Beethoven Blessing

If you ask most people to choose between having to be deaf or blind they quickly choose deafness. Since my ears are my most important and only constant instrument regardless of what kind of music I am doing, I quickly choose to go blind rather than lose such a critical tool for my art.

Beethoven started going deaf around the age of 30. In his wikipedia article it states that “Over time, his hearing loss became profound: there is a well-attested story that, at the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience; hearing nothing, he began to weep.” Beethoven’s last and unsuccessful attempt at performing his own work was in 1811, sixteen years before his death. So how did a man so profoundly deaf continue to compose new and influential pieces of music for 16 years, especially his ninth symphony and and the late string quartets?


Well, go back to his very first string quartets and you’ll find the exact same harmonic language. In fact, check out his symphonies or piano sonatas, everywhere the same chords follow the same sequences. So what was on Beethoven’s mind?

I would like to hypothesize: everything else. Notes are the most insignificant aspect of music. You either follow the principles and standards of a style or not, and therefore sound one way or another. This takes time to understand and be able to employ, certainly if you have an interest in numerous styles all with different aesthetic principles (or lack thereof) as well as general attitudes and emotional demands. Although it may take years to reach an adequate level of proficiency in simply being able to use the musical vocabulary of a style accurately, this is the first and least important step in the process of making beautiful music.

Once you’ve got your notes in order, it’s time to move on to all the other aspects of composition and improvisation such as dynamics, phrasing, form, motivic relations, etc. that make great music what it is.

So how did Beethoven’s music evolve over his career? Well, I recently read quite a few chunks of a book called “Inside Beethoven's quartets: history, interpretation, performance” by Lewis Lockwood and the Juilliard String Quartet. It helped me understand what was so amazing about Beethoven as well as how he became increasingly sophisticated over time. It had nothing to do with harmonic inventions. Beethoven was an architect. How bits of musical information interacted, how he played with form and structure, with dynamics and pacing, was what made him a master.

So why blessing? Well, for starters, check out Christos Hatzis’ essay called “The Crucible of Contemporary Music.” One thing he talks about is that when we start out as artists, we are, in all honestly, just following an egotistical desire for attention and affection. Over time, if you’re lucky, this urge to create can grow into something more mature, more mystical, and less self-centered.

So why the Beethoven Blessing? Beethoven understood better than any other composer had until that time that we would turn him into something he wasn’t: a caricature and a god. He was the first composer to take very seriously the idea that he was writing music for people who he would never meet, perhaps for off into the future. When people reacted negatively to his middle or late quartets, he responded that they were written for the future, for others who would be able to understand them better (I’d love to be more specific but I returned the book over a month ago and don’t feel like doing the research, but this fact is based on an anecdote told by Lewis Lockwood who is a serious Beethoven scholar). Beethoven had an ego. A big ego. You need one to do what he did. You have to believe yourself capable of great things before you stand a chance at doing them. It’s a struggle not to let that get to your head.

Although Beethoven’s deafness brought him great suffering and made him suicidal, in a way it was a blessing because it forced him to limit his artistic vision to a very specific set of criteria. If he had never gone deaf he might have simply tried to do too much, even with all his colossal talent. If he had never gone deaf, we would never have all the beautiful works that he could not have written unless he had gone deaf. And he might have spent too much time anticipating much of the harmonic innovations which would be developed over the following century and as a result not succeeded in being the pinnacle of structural genius of Western music.

Furthermore, Beethoven’s deafness is a blessing to the rest of us, because it teaches us how much goes into the art of composition and interpretation that is completely outside the mere selection of notes.

One afterthought while we’re on Beethoven, a post-script so to speak, is that I don’t agree with the notion of writing for the future. Music is about connecting to an audience. A live audience. Not necessarily a large audience. Not even necessarily an audience at all, just the simple sharing of music amongst musicians creating a moment together is a beautiful thing. Compositional tools which have no impact on a listener are completely unnecessary from the perspective of creating for an audience. That isn’t to say they must be completely abandoned. If they don’t detract from the piece of music emotionally at all, and they bring the composer satisfaction, no harm done. But if the composer’s intellectual satisfaction comes at the expense of the listener’s emotional satisfaction, than in a very real way the composition is a failure. I bring this up because, sometimes Beethoven is simply too long for me. I was surprised to find after listening to the quartet Op. 130 that not only was it extremely long, but it was long even though the Alban Berg quartet had actually left out many repeats in their performance. Of course, if a piece is written for musicians to perform simply for their own enjoyment in private, then the composer has met the goal of satisfying his audience and has succeeded even if most people won’t like it. Still it’s funny how so many jazz musician’s and classical composers resent the fact that their music is not appreciated by a wider audience yet they make no effort to accommodate and compromise with this audience. Every relationship is a two way street.