Beethoven's Deafness: The Dates, the Ear Trumpets and the Conversation Books

When Beethoven's hearing loss began, in his own letters

By the most cited documents, Beethoven's hearing loss started in 1796, when he was 26. He first wrote about it himself in two letters to his friend F. G. Wegeler, dated June 29 and November 16, 1801.

In 1802 he described it again in the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers Kaspar Karl and Johann. In the English translation quoted by the European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, he writes: "I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude."

This page keeps to dates and to the aids he used. The causes of his deafness are a medical question, and we leave them to medical sources.

The hearing aids Beethoven used

Beethoven began to use ear trumpets in 1813. They were built for him by J. N. Mälzel. A second aid sat on his instrument: a resonating plate placed on the piano that reflected the sound waves toward him, "however also with limited benefits", in the words of the same review.

The review counts the ear trumpets and the plate as the hearing aids of his lifetime. Electric hearing aids and the US rules on selling them came much later: see our history of hearing aids.

The conversation books

From 1818, Beethoven used conversation books to talk with visitors. In the Beethoven-Haus Bonn description, the visitor wrote down a question and Beethoven answered out loud.

The books also record his working sessions. A study in PLoS ONE notes, from the conversation books, that "it was his nephew, Karl, who jotted down the tempi of the 9th Symphony while the composer rehearsed it on the piano".

The books are not an untouched record. After Beethoven's death, his secretary Anton Schindler took them and, the Beethoven-Haus writes, misused them "by falsifying or removing entries".

How many conversation books exist

No one knows how many books Beethoven filled. His biographer Thayer mentions "around 400", a number the Beethoven-Haus says "might, however, be founded on a misunderstanding".

The count that can be checked comes from a sale. In 1846 Schindler sold all the conversation books he held to the Berlin Royal Library, today the Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage. They numbered 137, plus several loose sheets.

How deaf Beethoven was, year by year

Witness accounts gathered in the review trace the years after the ear trumpets:

• 1814: the composer Louis Spohr described a high-grade hearing loss.
• 1815: spoken conversation was still possible by speaking into his left ear.
• January 1819: the poet P. D. A. Atterbom described him as "deaf as a block".
• May 1824: at the premiere of his 9th symphony, he did not hear the cheering and had to be turned around by a singer to see the applause of the audience.