The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Read Free

Beethoven.
     In 1804, Stephan von Breuning writes to a mutual friend that as a result of Beethoven’s
     “waning of hearing … [h]e has become very withdrawn and often mistrustful of his best
     friends, and irresolute in many things!” 18 But, as biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us, the withdrawal, mistrust, and retreat
     from everyday concerns were there all along: “During his childhood, Beethoven often
     wrapped himself in a cloak of silence as a shield against both the vicissitudes of
     external reality and the traumatic events within his family constellation.” 19 Pushed forward as a Mozart-like prodigy by his alcoholic, dissolute, abusive father,
     Beethoven retreated into solitude and daydreaming, the defense of a figurative deafness,
     well before any literal manifestation.
    If the onset of hearing loss fed into Beethoven’s penchant for isolation, his penchant
     for isolation may have, in turn, fed an exaggerated sense of the extent of his deafness.
     Recent proposed guidelines for tinnitus diagnosis include the reminder that “it has
     become clear in recent years that the ‘problem’ of tinnitus relates far more to the
     individual’s psychological response to the abnormal tinnitus signal than to the signal
     itself.… [I]n some cases the altered mood state predates tinnitus onset … making it
     difficult to know whether tinnitus causes psychological disturbance, or whether psychological
     disturbance facilitates the emergence of tinnitus.” 20
    Nevertheless, the adaptability of so much of Beethoven’s middle-period “heroic” output
     to narratives of crisis and triumph has contributed to a popular sense that his deafness
     was sudden and total, rather than gradual. One finds it in an entry from an American
     music-lover’s diary, published in
Dwight’s Journal of Music
in 1853: “[Beethoven] was deaf, poor man, when he wrote the 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th,
     and 8th Symphonies. Deaf when he composed ‘Fidelio,’ ‘The Ruins of Athens,’ the two
     Masses, &c.” 21
    The unidentified diarist was actually Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who would later undertake
     extensive research in Germany and Austria and produce a pioneering Beethoven biography,
     the first volume of which appeared in 1866; based on Thayer’s findings, most critics
     and scholars would adopt a more nuanced view of Beethoven’s deafness. But the story
     of a stone-deaf Beethoven and his dauntless musical response was too good, too inspirational,
     not to survive. The American composer Frances McCollin, for example, blind from the
     age of five, took powerful inspiration from the story, starting when she attended
     a dress rehearsal for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s inaugural concertin 1900: “[S]he heard the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which made
     her think of the deaf Beethoven and she burst into tears.” 22 McCollin’s story echoes one from the six-year-old Clara Schumann—who, for reasons
     similar to Beethoven’s, was so withdrawn as a child that her parents thought she,
     too, might be deaf—noting in her diary, “I heard a grand symphony by Beethoven which
     excited me greatly.” 23
    The image of a young, completely deaf Beethoven gained a foothold in children’s literature,
     offering an educational example of human perseverance (and, maybe, playing on a child’s
     delight in paradox: a composer who can’t hear).
McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader
included an excerpt from Harriet Martineau’s
The Crofton Boys
, in which young Hugh Proctor’s mother tries to console him after he has had his foot
     amputated:
    “Did you ever hear of Beethoven? He was one of the greatest musical composers that
     ever lived. His great, his sole delight was in music. It was the passion of his life.
     When all his time and all his mind were given to music, he suddenly became deaf, perfectly
     deaf; so that he never more heard one single note from the loudest orchestra. While
     crowds were moved and