Conduction
I SOON DISCOVERED that an admission of deafness provoked a variety of responses – sympathy and interest from many, and a sincere desire to make things easier, but also a saggy, dated humour. I made the quips easier, told them first against myself, got the hardest cut in fast.
Friends and family seemed confused. Face to face, nothing seemed to have changed. As long as the conditions were right, I still heard, so I still responded. Which meant it was a hard thing for others to judge – did that mean this was a big deal or a little one? What were they supposed to say? After all, this really wasn’t supposed to be a problem for our demographic. We were media types in our twenties equipped to deal with specific types of crisis (minor wars, romantic calamities), not the stoppage of significant bits of ourselves. Once this had got past the headline moment, what exactly was the right emotional tone? Was this thing boring or dramatic, or could it safely be downgraded to yesterday’s news?
It also took me a long time to realise that others were waiting to take their cues from me. On some secret level I might believe I had brought deafness upon myself, but I also thought I was the victim, which meant I also thought it was the world’s job to be nice to me. In fact, as anyone with a health condition or disability knows, it’s up to them to take charge. When I met someone new it would have been so easy just to say, ‘I can’t hear very well, so it would really help if you could speak clearly, keep facing me, and please don’t cover your mouth.’ By doing so I would have given them permission to ask, established the boundaries and made the situation much easier for both of us. Instead I made sure people couldn’t see the aids and tried my best to pretend I could hear well. What that meant in practice was that I’d occasionally blank someone mid-sentence or walk away from them while they were still talking. Several people told me later that I’d ignored someone who had just asked me a question or failed to respond when someone called my name. Being knowingly rude to someone is one thing, but to do it involuntarily seemed terrible to me. So I’d blame myself, go down a little lower, become a little less capable of speaking at all.
It was no good me complaining that my friends never cut me any slack when I never cut myself any. I wanted people to notice, I didn’t want them to notice. I wanted mercy but I didn’t want pity. I wanted to be the victim, but I kept insisting on independence. I wanted others to be clear, but I smudged the problem. Nobody could quite get a handle on this. Least of all, it seemed, me.
THE ONLY WAY I COULD THINK of to find a foothold on this precarious ground was to look for role models – famous people who had been deafened in later life, and to find out how they had coped. The trouble was, that route only led to one destination. Think of someone famous and deafened, and who do you think of? Beethoven. Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, genius, immortal. As a role model for musical prodigies, he couldn’t be bettered. As an example of how to live your life once you started to lose your hearing, he was … mixed.
Besides, with Beethoven there was an obvious proviso. Anyone who starts to lose their hearing can stake their claim before their own personal gods or monsters that it shouldn’t be them, that it should never be them, that they of all people are special or exempt or engaged in lifesaving work of national importance. Anyone can protest that when the genes were handed out they’d been waiting in the wrong queue. Anyone can stand in the Court of Special Pleading and argue that the other chap should get it instead. But the individuals who surely make the most compelling defendants are musicians. What can it be like to make a song and then find yourself locked out of it? How would it feel to compose something and so humiliate yourself trying to conduct it that the orchestra drives you from the room? Who would you become if your own playing had fallen so far out of tempo that it was now a joke, an embarrassment, a source of public pity? What must it be to have a thousand symphonies resounding in your head but to be unable to hear a single note?
In the summer of 1802, Beethoven’s doctor recommended a period of country life to ease his health and give him time away from the pressures of city life. Sent to a house in what was then the small rural village of Heiligenstadt and is now a suburb of Vienna, Beethoven found himself alone. He was 32 then and had been aware that he was losing his hearing for a while.
On 6 October 1802, he sat down to write to his brothers Carl and Johann:
Oh, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me … I was ever inclined to accomplish great things. But think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or perhaps be impossible).
Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to withdraw myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’ Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection … If I approach people, a hot terror seizes me and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed … what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair – a little more and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back … perhaps I shall get better, perhaps I shall not …
The Heiligenstadt Testament has been read as lots of things – a suicide note, a will – but its emotional truth has never been doubted. Though Beethoven twists from shame to fury to grief to grandiosity and back again, it was not something written without forethought. Unusually, he made a clear and mostly error-free fair copy, meaning that he’d written at least one draft beforehand, and if it was ever intended as a suicide note he certainly never acted on it. The document was only found after his death in 1827.
Anton Schindler was the first and most unreliable of Ludwig van Beethoven’s many biographers. His account of a rehearsal for Fidelio in 1822 should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, but gives some sense of the truth of Beethoven’s situation by the time he reached his fifties:
After several days of indecision, he finally declared his readiness to conduct the work, a deplorable decision on many counts … In the very first number, the duet, … it was apparent that Beethoven could hear nothing of what was happening on the stage. He seemed to be fighting to hold back. The orchestra stayed with him but the singers pressed on and at the point where knocking is heard at the prison door, everything fell apart. Umlauf [the other conductor] told the musicians to stop without telling the Master the reason … The duet began again, and as before, the disunity was noticeable, and again at the knocking there was general confusion. Again the musicians were stopped. The impossibility of continuing under the direction of the creator of the work was obvious. But who was to tell him, and how? Neither the manager Duport nor Umlauf wanted to have to say, ‘It cannot be done. Go away, you unhappy man!’ Beethoven, now growing apprehensive, turned from one side to another, searching the faces to see what was interrupting the rehearsal. All were silent … I stepped to his side in the orchestra and he handed me his notebook … I wrote as fast as I could something like, ‘Please don’t go on. I’ll explain at home.’ He jumped down onto the floor and said only, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Without stopping, he hastened to his apartment … Once there, he threw himself on the sofa, covered his face with both hands, and remained so until we went to dinner.
Both doctors and musicians have spent the time since Beethoven’s death squabbling over the reasons for his deafness and for his chronic ill-health. For every symptom there’s been an explanation, and for every complaint there’s been a cure. Over the past two centuries, Beethoven has been retrospectively diagnosed with typhoid, cirrhosis, syphilis, brain trauma, meningitis, lead poisoning, Paget’s, Crohn’s and Whipple’s diseases, liver disease, TB, diarrhoea, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, anorexia, colic, jaundice, hepatitis, rheumatoid arthritis, labyrinthitis, gout, pancreatitis, lupus, sarcoidosis and smallpox – a whole encyclopaedia’s-worth of sickness, disease and disorder abbreviated into one tumultuous life. He went deaf because he’d listened to too much music, or because he liked dunking his head in water to cool down, or because he’d chewed on his pencil too much, or because he got so angry he’d flung himself to the floor, or because he had once stood in front of a draughty open window with no clothes on. Even now, there are plenty of experts suggesting that if Beethoven had only stopped drinking or accepted the love of a good woman, then perhaps his story might have resolved itself very differently.
From his description of his symptoms, it sounds as if Beethoven suffered from an exquisitely unpleasant form of hearing loss – not just sensorineural loss, but also tinnitus and hyperacusis, which meant that the sounds he could hear were often painful to him. In the Heiligenstadt Testament he claims he had already been aware of problems for six years, though he also said he experienced periods when his hearing either stabilised or improved. Whether or not this was true his hearing gradually degenerated.
When it became evident that neither tepid baths in the Danube nor burning herbal poultices were going to restore him to health, he turned instead to mechanical forms of amplifying what remained. When that too failed, he began using the conversation books, quarto-sized notepads on which people could write questions or comments that he responded to verbally.
He also recognised what many musicians have understood since – that he could tune his own body. Though it’s probable that Beethoven had also lost quite a lot of his conductive hearing, he could still rest his head against the piano to let sound play up through his skull, or use some form of conduit to draw it into himself. At the Beethoven Haus, there’s a long wooden rod which the composer used to direct notes from the piano. Sitting at the keyboard with the lid open, he would clench the stick between his teeth and poke it towards the strings. When the wood touched the metal, the sound waves vibrated up through the wood to his teeth and into his bones. The technique wouldn’t have given him a particularly good sense of the pitch of each note, but it would have allowed him some sense of its placing and its rhythm.
He was also supposed to have cut the legs off one of his pianos to better hear the resonance from it, though it’s a hard story to verify. All his pianos would probably have had detacheable legs to make them easier to move, and though placing the soundboard directly onto a wooden floor would certainly have increased the ‘feel’ of each note, trying a run-through of the Eroica on a keyboard five inches off the ground would have been gymnastically near-impossible.
But when I looked through his story, what really interested me was what Beethoven made of his life once he became deaf. That, and what other people made of him.
ALMOST TWO CENTURIES LATER, I seemed to be playing a similar tune. Even if I couldn’t follow the magnitude of his loss I could certainly recognise many of Beethoven’s reactions, and those of others to him. How ridiculous it was to swear his brothers to secrecy in the Heiligenstadt Testament when it was perfectly obvious what was happening to him. How silly to talk to no one about it and then complain that the world didn’t understand. How absurd to hurl his mechanical aids across the room because they could never offer him the sound of true music. And how desolate to stand beside his friend in the autumn fields but be unable to share a single moment of their experience.
And those flickering moods – I knew those too. I’m such a victim, I’m such a martyr, I’m so lost, I’m so ashamed, I am wronged, the world’s against me, maybe there’s a cure, probably there is none. Reading the Testament back, it sounded like drink, though it wasn’t. That was just what happened when you sat down, thought about deafness and allowed yourself a whole evening of feeling sorry for yourself.
Oddly enough, I did understand a tiny portion of his feelings about music too. I wasn’t a musician, I was just an ordinary member of the audience. But the idea of a life without music seemed like the idea of a life without sky. I might not speak melody the way a composer did but I simply couldn’t comprehend the notion that it might now be a finite resource. I tried, but I just didn’t understand what that meant, and however long I thought about it I just couldn’t make the concept compute. So soon there would be no more songs? How could music just cease to exist? Where did it go? And, more importantly, what else might then push in to fill that void?
I suppose it was an odd reaction. If I was going to lose my hearing, then surely music shouldn’t be top of that loss. That place must surely belong to voices, to speech and laughter. But there was something really specific about that soft repeat-to-fade – something which didn’t apply so much to voices, or which I could somehow handle better. In part it was because the difference between raw music and digital music was so stark. By now, it didn’t matter whether I was listening to the massively amplified soundtrack of a film or to a friend with a guitar, all of it had to be filtered through the digital aids, which meant that all sound already had half its colour washed out. The shape of the song was still there all right – Beck was still Beck, Bowie still Bowie – but the emotional jolt had gone. There on the radio was the song’s skeleton – its height and shape, its familiar attributes – but its guts weren’t there any more. I just couldn’t figure it out. Music used to be a sustenance, now it was a nuisance. It was there, but it was lost. Something of it was still in the room but it was a wraith of what it had once been. The music which I used to love was … well, it was OK, but it was really nothing to fuss about.
It also now presented a serious timetabling issue. Because my capacity to filter and prioritise sound had dropped, I had to make a choice about what I could hear and what I couldn’t, which meant that any situation in which music was playing in the background presented a challenge. I could still listen to it, but if I did, it had to be the only thing in the room. It couldn’t just be there noodling away behind the sofa, it had to be a conscious choice. And muzac – a shop’s ambient twiddlings, playlists in a café – was now something which scraped at my concentration and fought the person I was trying to hear. Instead of being able to select what I heard, it was now every track sounding straight over the top of another. Which somehow meant that this new zombie music all medicated down to a kind of digital half-life seemed to be coming at me with far more purpose than the rich, living version which had existed before.
WHAT EMERGES FROM all the reported accounts of Beethoven’s visitors was how very uncomfortable everyone found his deafness. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Vienna, hearing loss carried exactly the same connotations as it does now, and many people seemed perplexed as to how to handle him. Should they simply deal with Beethoven the man and pretend the deafness wasn’t there? Should they pity him? Or should they behave as if he was some dangerous escapee from a zoo, best tranquillised with flattery but contained behind musical bars?
The trouble was that Beethoven was famous – excessively famous – during his own lifetime. First he was famous because he was a brilliant composer, and then he was famous because he was a brilliant deaf composer. But even before he started to lose his hearing, he had become the subject of two powerful but conflicting myths. In one, he was a genius, an immortal adornment to Europe’s creative pantheon. In the other, he was a nutter and a slob who could barely dress himself. It was Mozart all over again, a musician who wrote as if he was taking dictation from angels, but a man so backward he still thought fart jokes were funny. In Beethoven’s case, the addition of deafness only strengthened both perceptions. He was a colossus, but he was unmanageable. He was a prodigy, but he was an idiot. He was a masterpiece, but you couldn’t go near him. His music was celestial, but he raved like Bedlam. Very few people could line up the two images – half-genius, half-miscreation – and steer a clear course between them.
Beethoven was used to – and often complained about – a constant stream of musicians, acquaintances, friends, tradesmen, conductors, petitioners, patrons and students appearing at his door. In the years when he was still able to hear shouted conversation, some visitors wrote up their meeting as if nothing was amiss. OK, so the composer might have had his shirt on upside down or might not have been wearing any trousers, but they’d talked about music and politics and Great Things, and the visitors had returned home delighted to have experienced a real-live prodigy in his native environment. Or they’d found him in a state of complete disorder, as Friedrich Starke had done in 1821:
I called on him one morning and being a friend was at once admitted by the servant. I searched through the house in vain until I reached his bedroom. As knocking was useless, one generally entered unannounced, and to my astonishment I found Beethoven sitting in the middle of the room in his shirt … He had thickly lathered his face the evening before, and had forgotten to shave. His absence of mind was a ludicrous and yet at the same time a melancholy spectacle. The soap had dried overnight, and looked like paste sticking to chin and cheeks. But not at all disconcerted, he only motioned to me to withdraw until he had put himself to rights and came out of the room in a few minutes.
There are certainly countless stories of Beethoven’s indifference to dress or behaviour. On a couple of occasions he was mistaken for a tramp, on another he was taken into police custody for causing a public nuisance. Since he was always having tantrums and sacking his servants, his clothes often went unwashed for weeks at a time and his friends finally realised that the only way to get him to freshen up was to steal the old linen, and substitute new. Beethoven apparently never noticed the difference.
All of which ties in perfectly with the great romantic notion of genius – of individuals whose mind and spirit are so utterly directed towards their art that there remains no space for anything else. Thus the general view of him was summed up by Carl Friedrich, Baron Kübeck von Kübau: ‘Whoever sees Beethoven for the first time and knows nothing about him would surely take him for a malicious, ill-natured and quarrelsome drunk who has no feeling for music.’
For his musical contemporaries, Beethoven’s high profile presented additional problems. With time and teamwork, they were able to come up with strategies to circumvent some aspects of his deafness, thus allowing him to continue appearing in front of audiences. Though Beethoven himself understood that his hearing loss prevented him from conducting his own works, the desire to present them never left him. On the one hand, his contemporaries understood that desire – even encouraged it, since the presence of the composer at one of his own performances was a huge publicity draw. On the other, and as Schiller’s account of the Fidelio rehearsal had revealed, if Beethoven conducted, then the orchestra couldn’t play.
Part of what is interesting about the responses of Beethoven’s visitors is what they say about attitudes to deafness. Admittedly, Beethoven was an extreme case. Much of the time he probably was unmanageable – a rage of different passions and conflicting drives – but some of that anger must have stemmed from the frustration in communicating to the outside world who he was. Even so, what his visitors’ accounts often highlight is just how little has changed in the centuries since. Evident in every single line of all those accounts are the personalities of those who met him. His visitors didn’t just observe him, they brought to the room their own confusions, prejudices, jealousies and desires. And what they saw usually says far more about them than it does about him.