Beethoven

[hugoboss]

Sorry if this sounds naive - but how did Beethoven compose music if he was deaf?

[Clanad]

Doctor Marage, who performed the autopsy on Ludwig Van  on March 27, 1827, brought up Beethoven's deafness at the conference of the French Academy of Sciences on January 9th and 23rd 1928, as well as December 2nd 1929.

He thought that Beethoven's deafness was due to a labyrinthitis of intestinal origin, that is to say that he had a lesion of the inner ear. According to Doctor Marage, who has studied Beethoven's letters, buzzing noises and other sounds started at around 1796. Deafness broke out in 1798 and Beethoven had lost 60% of his hearing by 1801. In 1816 he was completely deaf. The above information is from Ludwig Van Beethoven's Biography.  The supposition is that he was able to hear most of his life and, therefore, could recognize tones and especially disonances simply by the written musical notes.  In fact, some, at the time, speculated that one reason for his brilliant compositions was that he didn't hear and this enabled him to construct symphonies without the distraction of hearing other composer's work...

[andy hughes]

In his later years, when the deafness affected his ability to compose properly, Beethoven sawed the legs off his painao, and used the floor as a sounding board. Lying with his ear to the wooden floor, and hitting the piano notes at various volumes to guage if the volume fitted with the music he could hear in his head.

[stevie21]

This is an absolute stab in the dark and is 100% unfounded but if I went blind tomorrow, I'd still remember the shapes of letters and be able to write sentences.
Maybe part of the story is that Beethoven could still remember the sounds in his head and was well practiced enough to be able to put them directly onto paper without having to have an instrument interpret them?

Mibbes aye, mibbes naw...

[Grunty]

Just as an aside, in a Czech museum I saw a collection of documents signed by Beethoven in which he seems to describe the presentation of his name according to the political situation.  He signs variously as Ludwig, Ludovic, Louis and Luigi.  The van is also interchangeable with von.

[Grunty]

Sorry about the wording of that one.  I saw it just as I clicked on the button.

[ludwig]

We can all 'hear' music in our head. Think of a simple tune - yellow submarine for example. You will find that you can hum it in your mind. I suppose that he just composed in his head like that and wrote it straight down on paper. When you are an expert musician with perfect pitch, it's not that hard to write musical notation just like anyone would write a sentence of text. He would have known what it was going to sound like without having to hear it.