Beethoven had evidently become aware of a problem with his hearing in around 1796 when he was still only twenty-five and at the peak of his career as a pianist. He waited a further four years before admitting it for the first time in a touching and intimate letter dated 1 June 1800 to his close Viennese friend Carl Amenda. After a further two years when the deafness had inexorably progressed, he poured his heart out in the Heiligenstadt Testament addressed to his younger brothers. In it Beethoven described himself as still only twenty-eight whereas in fact he was nearly thirty-two. (He was always confused about his birth date because his father Johann used randomly to knock years off his age as a boy to make him appear a more marketable ‘Wunderkind’). It is a pitiful confession, as though of a crime. ‘For me there can be no relaxation in human company, decent conversation, mutual exchanges. I can talk to people only when it is absolutely necessary. I must live like an exile’, he wrote. ‘If I come near people a hot terror seizes me, a dread of putting myself in danger that they will detect my condition.’ And on and on in the same vein, erratic punctuation betraying his lack of elementary schooling. It is dated ‘Heiglnstadt [sic] October 6 1802’. Four days later he added an even more heartbroken codicil:

Heiglnstadt October 10 1802.

So I take leave of you—and sadly, for the blessed hope I brought here that I might at least be partly cured must now be utterly abandoned. It has withered like the falling leaves of autumn. I go away again almost as I came. Even the high courage that often inspired me in the beautiful days of summer has vanished. Oh Providence! Just give me one day of pure joy: it is so long since I heard the inner echo of real happiness. Oh immortal spirit! When, oh when can I once again feel it in the temple of nature and mankind? Never? No—oh, that would be too cruel.

Whatever else, this is not the fervent prayer of an orthodox Catholic. There are no appeals to the Virgin or the saints, and even God is de-Christianized as Providence. Together with the use of the word ‘temple’ the tone harks back to the usage of his old teacher Christian Neefe and his Masonic friends in the Bonn of his adolescence. The Heiligenstadt Testament reads almost like a suicide note—it was, after all, his will—except of course that Beethoven did not kill himself despite admitting ‘only a little more and I would have put an end to my life, it was only art that held me back. Ah! it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced everything I felt capable of, and so I carried on my miserable existence…’ This is the record of someone confronting the lowest point of his life, realizing he would not be cured, that his natural social ineptness was fatally worsened by being deaf, that he was doomed always to be misunderstood and never to acquire a partner, that he truly was alone. One wonders if years later when he was writing the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony it would seem painfully ironic as he set the lines in Schiller’s ‘Ode’ that run:

Whoever has won a beloved wife,

Let him add to the jubilation!…

And he who never achieved marriage,

Let him slink away in tears!

But by then he must have been long resigned to his fate. Despite an earlier succession of quite unrealistic romantic hopes, he had always been doomed to die a bachelor.

The Heiligenstadt Testament is undoubtedly a tragic document. Yet even so, it is hard for modern readers to know why Beethoven should have experienced his deafness as quite such a profound source of shame. Maybe it was more a shrinking from the consequences: the irony of a musician losing his most precious asset; the end of his livelihood of public performing; foreseeing the magnanimous pity of bitter rivals and inferiors who would now eagerly reclaim the limelight he had to leave. Yet the tone of this ‘confession’ is similar to that of someone in a twentieth-century suicide note describing a sexuality that he felt had made him a social outcast (‘a dread of putting myself in danger that they will detect my condition’). One might have imagined that in Beethoven’s day of dubious medical recourse—the quack doctors, epidemic diseases, untreatable disabilities and early deaths—his deafness was more likely to have attracted matter-of-factness and sympathy. After all, he must have known for some time that his playing was becoming increasingly inaccurate. He would have glimpsed occasional winces in faces that once were rapt and tearful. But his life furnishes ample evidence of how bad he was at judging people’s reactions, having very little understanding of either himself or of others. It was not just his puns he misjudged: he had simply never acquired many of the basics of ordinary human relations. Beethoven was hopelessly ill equipped to deal with his own overwhelming genius, and his deafness only threw it and him into increasing proximity.

Yet in some way the Heiligenstadt crisis must have been cathartic because his truly Promethean creativity never flagged. While working on the piano variations in that summer of 1802 he had also been playing around with ideas for a grand new symphony. Beethoven’s copious sketches for what was to become the ‘Eroica’ provide a fascinating insight into what one might call his purposeful gropings towards its final version. In Heiligenstadt he made sketches for the first three movements but seemed not to bother with the finale, presumably since he must already have decided on a set of orchestral variations and fugue on the same ‘Prometheus’ theme, and its outlines were probably clear enough in his mind not to need roughing out at this stage. Obviously its key of E flat major would determine that of the symphony as a whole. As it turned out, he never used these initial drafts. They were part of the laborious craft by which he slowly constructed all his masterpieces as one by one the ideas became clearer to him. After that autumn in Heiligenstadt he shelved the work while keeping it very much alive at the back of his mind.

The best part of a year then went by while he worked at a steady pace on commissions, finishing the Second Symphony, the three violin sonatas, Op. 30, the three piano sonatas, Op. 31, an unsuccessful oratorio Christus am Oelberge (‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’) and much else besides. Then in the early summer of 1803, in response to his usual urge to get out of Vienna’s dust and noise into the countryside, he again rented rooms, this time in Oberdöbling, not far from Heiligenstadt. Armed with his own heroic acceptance of his fate and a new sketchbook he settled down to serious work on the symphony. In the interim he must have done a good deal of thinking and now had a much clearer idea of where the piece was going. At some point the project had jelled around a ‘programme’ he would probably have been unable to describe schematically, but which had evidently taken overall shape in his mind as partly occupying the portentous spaces defined by ‘Bonaparte’ and ‘heroism’ and partly reflecting his own renewed dedication to his exacting muse.

              

* See Chapter 2.