Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament
On 6 October 1802 Ludwig van Beethoven confessed his despair at the loss of his hearing in the Heiligenstadt Testament.
By 1800 Beethoven was in Vienna and thriving. He received more lucrative commissions than he could fulfil. Seven publishers vied for the rights to his works.
But he was restless. He moved address often, now in the city centre, now in a bastion on the city wall. It was, perhaps, a symptom of distress. ‘I feel that I shall soon go mad in consequence of my unmerited fame’, he wrote. ‘I almost dread some fresh calamity.’
In April 1802 he took his doctor’s advice and decamped to Heiligenstadt, a small village two miles to the north of the capital. The crisis followed him. He was 31 and going deaf.
The problem had begun some six years earlier. He once claimed that it came upon him suddenly after he threw himself to the floor in a rage during a row with a troublesome tenor. ‘When I arose I found myself deaf’, he said.
‘My hearing has become weaker and weaker’, he wrote in 1801. ‘My ears continue to hum and buzz day and night … at a distance I cannot hear the high notes of instruments.’
Beethoven poured out his misery in a document known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, addressed to his brothers and dated 6 October. It is, in part, a valediction. ‘Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead’, he writes at its close. But it is neither quite a will nor a suicide note.
At its heart is the particular horror of hearing loss for a composer and the impossibility of speaking about it. ‘How could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others?’ he wrote. ‘I fear being exposed.’
The Testament seems to have been cathartic. Beethoven returned to Vienna a few days later and began work on his only oratorio, Christus am Ölberge, about Christ’s last night in Gethsemene. He saw himself in Christ’s suffering: the libretto parallels his Testament in numerous places.
Eventually he could only register loud, low-frequency sounds: thunder, gunfire, wagon wheels on the cobbled streets. He communicated solely through ‘conversation books’. And through his music, which never stopped.