Ludwig van Beethoven is often considered the greatest composer in the history of Western music. Born in Bonn in 1770 and trained from childhood as a pianist, he moved to Vienna in his early twenties and quickly established himself as both a performer and a composer of remarkable originality. By his late twenties, however, he began to notice a strange ringing in his ears, and his hearing slowly but steadily grew worse.
Deafness is a disaster for any musician, but for Beethoven it was almost unimaginable. In 1802, at the age of 32, he retreated to the village of Heiligenstadt, where he wrote a long, desperate letter to his brothers that was only discovered after his death. In the letter, now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, he confessed that he had thought of ending his life, but had decided that the music still inside him would not let him do so.
He returned to Vienna and continued to compose at an astonishing pace. Symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets and an opera followed one another, each more ambitious than the last. He performed less often, though, because he could no longer hear the orchestra. Eventually he could not hear his own playing. Conversations had to be held through small notebooks that friends and visitors carried with them.
The Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824, is the best-known example of the extraordinary music Beethoven produced when he was almost totally deaf. At the first performance, he stood near the orchestra, beating the time he could no longer hear. When the music ended, one of the singers had to turn him around so that he could see the audience applauding. He died three years later, admired as a genius across Europe.