Was Beethoven completely deaf?

The claim, and the verdict

The claim usually comes in one of two forms. Either “Beethoven was deaf”, as if he always had been, or “Beethoven wrote his music while completely deaf”, as if all of it was composed in silence.

The verdict: both are too simple. His deafness was gradual. It started in his late twenties, made performing impossible by about 1815, and became profound by the 1820s. Whether he lost every last trace of hearing is uncertain: some accounts from his final years suggest he could still sense very loud sounds or low tones, especially in one ear. What is certain is that the Ninth Symphony, the Missa solemnis and the late string quartets were written when he could no longer follow music or speech by ear. He heard them in his head, as trained composers can.

How Beethoven's hearing failed, year by year

His letter of 29 June 1801 to Wegeler is the key document. He described how in the theatre he had to lean close to the orchestra to understand the actors, how he could hear voices but not words, and how he could not bear it when someone shouted. He asked Wegeler to keep it secret: a deaf musician feared for his career. A few months later he wrote to him again:

In October 1802, staying in the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna, he wrote the document now called the Heiligenstadt Testament. He told his brothers that despair over his hearing had brought him close to ending his life, and that only his art had held him back. He never sent it. It is one of the most honest accounts of disability written by any artist.

The Ninth Symphony premiere in 1824

The Ninth Symphony was first performed on 7 May 1824 at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna. The theatre's music director, Michael Umlauf, actually conducted; he had told the players to follow him, not Beethoven, who stood near him and gave the tempos. At the end, according to accounts later collected by his biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Beethoven was still facing the orchestra, turning pages, when the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round so he could see the audience clapping and waving hats and handkerchiefs.

The details differ between witnesses, written down years later, and some say it happened after the second movement rather than at the end. But they agree on the core: he could not hear the applause. That is the clearest single proof of how deaf he was by 1824.

How Beethoven composed when he could not hear

Composers trained as he was can hear music in their heads from the written page, and he had been writing music since childhood. He also kept sketchbooks, working out ideas on paper over months and years. Pianos were one way he still felt sound: he used instruments built loud, including a Broadwood sent from London in 1818, and in 1825 a Graf piano fitted with a resonator to direct sound towards him.

A popular story says he bit a rod resting on the piano to feel vibrations through his jaw. It comes from later recollections and may be true, but treat it as an anecdote, not a documented fact.

The music he wrote after hearing became a serious problem includes the Fifth Symphony (1808), the Emperor Concerto (1809), the Hammerklavier Sonata (1818), the Missa solemnis (finished 1823), the Ninth Symphony (1824) and the late quartets of 1825 and 1826. On the Missa solemnis he wrote a wish that music from the heart might go again to the heart.

Why Beethoven went deaf

Nobody knows. Proposed causes include otosclerosis (a bone growth in the middle ear), Paget's disease of bone, an autoimmune disease, typhus, and lead poisoning. Syphilis has also been suggested, without evidence.

Science has narrowed the question without answering it. A 2023 study in Current Biology, led by Tristan Begg, sequenced DNA from authenticated locks of his hair. It found genetic risk for liver disease and an infection with hepatitis B, but no genetic cause for his deafness, and it showed that one famous lock used in earlier lead studies came from a woman. A 2024 study reported high lead levels in authenticated locks, which may have contributed to his ill health; whether it caused his hearing loss is unproven.

How myths about Beethoven spread, and how to check them

Much of what people repeat about Beethoven comes from Anton Schindler, his secretary in the 1820s, who wrote a biography in 1840. Schindler destroyed many conversation books and added false entries to others, which scholars exposed in the 1970s. Always check whether a Beethoven story rests on Schindler alone.

1. Prefer Beethoven's own letters and the conversation books to later memoirs.
2. Check the date: a symptom in 1801 is not the same as deafness in 1824.
3. Ask who reported a scene, and how many years later.
4. Watch for the word “completely”: the evidence often supports “severely” instead.

You can ask Beethoven how he coped by talking with Ludwig van Beethoven in Yuga, by voice or text. It is an AI recreation built from his letters and the record, not the composer, and it can be wrong, so cite the letters and the Heiligenstadt Testament in your work. See also Beethoven 200 years on, 2027, Mozart and Beethoven compared and questions to ask Beethoven.