Beethoven Deaf Essay

Beethoven’s music abounds in repetition, especially repetition of short, highly recognizable units. 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.

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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. 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. Listening to a quiet piano sonata in an environment without distractions would likely be more pleasant than hearing a dramatic symphony. Repetition is particularly important to someone who is unable to absorb everything on first hearing.

Thus, though he was increasingly deaf, Beethoven began to feel sound in an entirely new way.

His final string quartets—actual products of his deafness—have a reputation for a kind of profundity that few nonmusicians could describe in words.

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.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.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.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.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.Ludwig van Beethoven occupies a larger-than-life place in our imaginations, all the more so because late in his life he accomplished the seemingly impossible: He continued to compose beautiful and enduring music even as he went deaf.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.