The symphony was a straitjacket
I must’ve needed. Need being relative—
the organ pipes (silver) looked like missiles,
that bright and tipped. The blue floodlights,
too, made paintings on the columns
but not of children dying, which would be
more accurate. My seatmate had lain her
jacket on the seat that was mine, a way
of marking what is whose and when.
Everywhere was genocide exploitation
genocide. Nowhere was not. Let them
call us what they will, then. Most of my life
has been spent seeming unmoved while
being displaced or unwritten. As usual,
most of me was absent from this particular
context, but the music was nice. I was
smiling/clapping but who knows if I meant
it. All this frequency in one space.
I was thinking about my friend Eileen again,
how much she loves Beethoven.
How she’d kept the letter I wrote her
when her father died. Love can be paper
like that: one of the lessons
of Immortal Beloved, her favorite movie
about Beethoven. Top that, I’d said
to him, triumphantly. Not Beethoven, but
a man in my life at that time. Then
the thwack of his hand on my ass,
which I barely felt, along an axis.
It’ll take more than that. Maybe a summit.
A summit might cure me. To sum it up:
I’ve been not bad at math. Good enough
to make a few lines count, at least that.

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This achievement is often seen as an example of super-heroic determination, a triumph of the human spirit that tests the boundaries of our species’ ingenuity. But Beethoven the man was not the Beethoven of our imaginations. His story, for all its wonder, is no myth; it offers unfussy but lasting lessons about music, hearing, and disability.

To begin with, accounts of Beethoven’s triumph are often overdone. He did not completely lose his hearing until the last decade of his life, if even then. For most of his adulthood he experienced progressive hearing loss, as many of us do as we age. When he wrote the Fifth Symphony, his most recognizable work, he could hear well enough to correct mistakes in the performance.

And Beethoven wasn’t a “supercrip,” the term for a person who responds to a disability in ways that inspire others but also set unreasonable expectations. He never claimed to be overcoming his hearing loss. Indeed, he accepted it and adapted to it, and this left recognizable marks on his music.

Beethoven’s manuscript of the piano sonata in E Major, Op. 109, shows him creating music on paper, getting carried away with rhythmic, repetitive writing patterns that mirror the emphatic rhythms of much of his music. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Where can those marks be found? The most obvious answers to that question are probably wrong, or at least misleading. Beethoven wrote a lot of loud music, but for someone with hearing loss, loud music is not necessarily better. Indeed, loud music can be painful to failing ears. Listening to a quiet piano sonata in an environment without distractions would likely be more pleasant than hearing a dramatic symphony.

Instead, look for his use of repeating phrases. Repetition is particularly important to someone who is unable to absorb everything on first hearing. Beethoven’s music abounds in repetition, especially repetition of short, highly recognizable units. Musicians call them motives. Beethoven established motives as the building blocks of his longer pieces, a process imitated by many later composers.

This is why the four-note motive at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony is repeated throughout the work. When he wrote this music, Beethoven needed to augment his perception of aural cues, much as a person with progressive hearing loss might augment their understanding of speech by beginning to read lips even if they’re not conscious they’re doing so.

Another sign can be found in his pianos, which changed over Beethoven’s lifetime. The early Viennese pianos he played as a young man had a clear, bell-like sound that was evidently easy for him to hear even as his hearing faded. As he grew older, he became more, not less, attached to his pianos, but what he needed from them was different.

The English Broadwood piano he owned during the last decade of his life was both louder and muddier sounding than the ones with which he grew up—again, the exact opposite of what someone with hearing loss would seem to require.

But Beethoven fell in love with the Broadwood for another reason entirely. It was vibrationally alive. The soundboard, which amplifies the vibrations produced by the strings, was connected directly to the body of the instrument, conveying those vibrations back to the keys and even to the floor beneath the instrument. Thus, though he was increasingly deaf, Beethoven began to feel sound in an entirely new way.

Late in his life, Beethoven commissioned the creation of a specially designed resonator that would be placed over his piano to magnify both sound and vibration. Recently researchers recreated the resonator; the results can be heard on a new recording of his last three sonatas made by fortepianist Tom Beghin. The preparations for Beghin’s recording made it clear just how important touch had become in Beethoven’s experience of music in his last years. The piano music he wrote at this time incorporated powerful repeated chords, new ways of resolving harmonies, and carefully synchronized passages in which the two hands combine to set the frame of the instrument vibrating from top to bottom.

Beethoven also used his eyes to create music. It has been said that both Mozart and Beethoven would compose an entire piece of music in their heads before writing it down. Scholars have known for decades that neither composer ever claimed to have done anything of the sort, but the story persists—perhaps because it provides an idea that is easy to grasp. If this story were true, it would demystify how Beethoven composed in his late years after his ears had failed him.

But Beethoven’s creative process was actually less daunting than the myth would have us believe. When you look at virtually any Beethoven manuscript or sketch, you can see that he was creating music on paper, frequently crossing out and replacing things that didn’t look right, or getting carried away with rhythmic, repetitive writing patterns that mirror the emphatic rhythms of much of his music. He heard what he saw and felt as his pen crossed the paper again and again in arcs and arabesques of musical creativity.

His final string quartets—actual products of his deafness—have a reputation for a kind of profundity that few nonmusicians could describe in words. There is no easy triumph or memorable musical tidbit to be found in them, but they contain a novel sonic universe that seems all the more remarkable when we know that they were written by a man who could not hear. Beethoven created these new textures and sonorities because he was being led by his eyes as much as by his memories of sound. Rather than detracting from his creative process, his deafness added dimensions to these late works that would not have been there otherwise.

Today, Beethoven says less to us about genius and more about how to come to terms with a disability. His experience resonates in an era where forms of human difference have been given unprecedented respect, and words like neurodiversity have entered our vocabulary. Neurodiversity—the idea that all humans occupy a spectrum that includes conditions once considered to be tragic illnesses—has helped bring autism, bipolarity, and depression out of the shadows. In this context it is easier to understand Beethoven’s hearing problems as a normal part of human experience.

Music is a multifaceted medium that inspires people to move, to feel, to watch, to think, and to share experiences with others. If composition were a magical superpower, the music of the great composers would not speak to the rest of us. The story Beethoven tells us is not one of triumphing over adversity, but one of acceptance of what cannot be changed, and of creative adaptation employing the tools at hand. It’s time we welcomed Beethoven on his own terms.

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The first thing to do on arriving at a symphony concert is to express the wish that the orchestra will play Beethoven’s Fifth. If your companion then says “Fifth what?” you are safe with him for the rest of the evening; no metal can touch you. If, however, he says “So do ­I”—­this is a danger signal and he may require careful handling.

—­Donald Ogden Stewart, Perfect Behavior (1922)

Jean-­François Le Sueur was not quite sure what to make of Beethoven’s Fifth. Le Sueur was a dramatic composer, a specialist in oratorios and operas, and the Parisian taste for such fare (along with Le Sueur’s career) had persisted from the reign of Louis XVI through the Revolution, through Napoléon, through the Restoration. For audiences suddenly to be whipped into a frenzy by instrumental ­music—­as they were in 1828, when a new series of orchestral concerts brought Paris its first sustained dose of Beethoven’s symphonies—­was something curious. Le Sueur, nearing 70, was too refined to fulminate, but he kept a respectful distance from the ­novelties—­that is, until one of his students, an up-­and-­coming enfant terrible named Hector Berlioz, dragged his teacher to a performance of the Fifth. Berlioz later recalled Le Sueur’s postconcert reaction: “Ouf! I’m going outside, I need some air. It’s unbelievable, wonderful! It so moved and disturbed me and turned me upside down that when I came out of my box and went to put on my hat, for a moment I ­didn’t know where my head was.”

Alas, in retrospect, it was too much of a shock: at his lesson the next day, Le Sueur cautioned Berlioz that “All the same, that sort of music should not be written.”

In 1920, Stefan Wolpe, then an 18-­year-­old student at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, organized a Dadaist provocation. He put eight phonographs on a stage, each bearing a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He then played all eight, simultaneously, with each record turning at a different speed.

A socialist and a Jew, Wolpe would flee Nazi Germany; he eventually ended up in America, cobbling together a career as an ­avant-­garde composer and as a teacher whose importance and influence belied his lack of fame. (The jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, shortly before he died, approached Wolpe about lessons and a possible commissioned piece.) In a 1962 lecture, Wolpe recalled his Dada years, revisiting his Beethoven collage; ­in a bow to technological change, this performance used only two phonographs, set at the ­once-­familiar 33 and 78 r.p.m. Wolpe then spoke of “one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability”:

That means that every moment events are so freshly invented,
so newly born,
that it has almost no history in the piece itself
but its own actual presence.

*

If today we regard Le Sueur’s frazzled confusion as quaint, it is at least in part because of the subsequent ubiquity of the Fifth Symphony. The music’s immediacy has been forever dented by its celebrity. Wolpe’s eightfold distortion can be heard as a particularly outrageous attempt to re-create Le Sueur’s experience of the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the ­work’s course was still unforeseeable. It is an uphill ­battle—­in the two centuries since its 1808 premiere, Beethoven’s Fifth has become so familiar that it is next to impossible to ­re-­create the disorientation that it could cause when it was newly born.

The disorientation is built right into the symphony’s opening. Or even, maybe, before the opening: the symphony begins, literally, with silence, an eighth rest slipped in before the first note. A rest on the downbeat, a bit of quiet, seems an inauspicious start. Of course, every symphony is surrounded by at least theoretical silence. Though, in reality, preconcert ambient noise, or at least its ­echoes—­overlapping conversations, shifting bodies, rustling programs, ­air-­conditioning, and so ­on—­may in fact bleed into the music being performed, we nonetheless create a perceptive line between nonmusic and music, enter into a conspiracy between performers and listeners that the composer’s statement is ­self-­contained, that there is a sonic buffer zone between everyday life and music. (Like most conspiracies, it thrives on partial truths.) The obvious interpretation is that silence functions as a frame for the musical object. The less obvious (and groovier) interpretation is that the music we hear is but one facet of the silence it comes out of.

This is almost certainly not what Beethoven was thinking about when he put a rest in the first measure of the Fifth Symphony. But, were Beethoven ­really trying to mess around with the boundary between his symphony and everything outside of it, he would have been anticipating the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the guru of deconstruction, by nearly 200 years. Derrida talks about frames in his book The Truth in Painting, noting that when we look at a painting, the frame seems part of the wall, but when we look at the wall, the frame seems part of the painting. Derrida terms this slipstream between the work and outside the work a parergon: “a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out, but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”

Our minds dissolve the frame as we cross the Rubicon into Art. But Beethoven drags the edge of the frame into the painting itself, stylizing it to the point that, for anyone reading the score, at least, this parergon refuses to go quietly, as it were. Beethoven waits until we’re ready, then gruffly asks if we’re ready yet.

We can see the silence on the page, in the form of the rest. But do we hear it in performance? The rest completes the meter of ­2/4—­two beats per measure, with the quarter note getting the ­beat—­which, normally, would mean that the second of the three following eighth notes would get a little extra emphasis. But most readings give heavy emphasis to all three eighth notes, steamrolling the meter (which is ­really only one beat to a bar ­anyway—­more on that in a minute). Paleobotanist, artist, and sometime composer Wesley Wehr recalled one consequence of such steamrolling:

Student composer Hubbard Miller, as the story goes, had once been beachcombing at Agate Beach. He paused on the beach to trace some musical staves in the sand, and then added the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hub had, however, made a slight mistake. Instead of using eighth notes for the famous “da, da, da, dum!,” Hub had written a triplet. He had the right notes, but the wrong ­rhythm—­an easy enough mistake for a young lad to make. Hub looked up to find an elderly man standing beside him, studying the musical misnotation. The mysterious man erased the mistake with one foot, bent down, and wrote the correct rhythmic notation in the sand. With that, he smiled at Hub and continued walking down the beach. Only later did Hub learn that he had just had a “music lesson” from Ernest Bloch.

Knowledge of the rest is like a secret handshake, admission into the guild. (Bloch, best known for his 1916 ­cello-­and- orchestra “Rhapsodie hébraïque” Schelomo, was also a dedicated photographer who liked to name his images of trees after composers: “Bloch sees ‘Beethoven’ invariably as a single massive tree appearing to twist and struggle out of the soil.”)

Indeed, one practical reason for the rest is to reassure the performers of the composer’s professionalism. Beethoven knew that any conductor would signal the downbeat anyway, so he put in the rest as a placeholder for the conductor’s gesture. And it’s liable to be a fairly dramatic gesture at that. The meter indicates two beats to the bar, but no conductor actually indicates both beats, as it would tend to bog down music that needs speed and forward momentum. Instead, the movement is conducted “in one,” indicating only the downbeat of every bar.

So the conductor has one snap of the baton to get the orchestra up to full speed. And the longer the Fifth Symphony has retained its canonical status, the more that task has come to be seen as perilous. For the two leading pre-World War I pundits of conducting, Richard Wagner and Felix Weingartner, starting the Fifth was no big deal. Wagner takes ignition for granted, being far more concerned with the lengths of the subsequent holds, while Weingartner scoffs at his colleague Hans von Bülow’s caution: “Bülow’s practice of giving one or several bars beforehand is quite unnecessary.” But jump ahead to the modern era, and one finds the British conductor Norman Del Mar warning of “would-­be adopters of the baton” suffering “the humiliation of being unable to start the first movement at all.” Gunther Schuller, American composer and conductor, is equally dire, calling the opening “one of the most feared conducting challenges in the entire classical literature.” Del Mar reaches this conclusion: “It is useless to try and formulate the way this is done in terms of conventional stick technique. It is direction by pure force of gesture and depends entirely on the will-­power and total conviction of the conductor.”

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