Beethoven could not hear the music he wrote.

At the age of 28, he realized he was no longer able to listen to a flute being played in the distance, and he spent the rest of his life composing the most enduring music in history in almost complete silence...

He had been a working musician since childhood. His ears were everything. In 1798, in the middle of a heated argument with a singer, he noticed for the first time that something was wrong. The sound was thinning at the edges. He could hear voices, but high frequencies were beginning to disappear. He told no one for years.

By 1802, the truth was no longer deniable. On his doctor's advice he moved to Heiligenstadt, a quiet village outside Vienna, hoping the country air would help. It did not. There, alone and surrounded by farmland, he wrote a letter to his two brothers that he never sent. It was found among his papers after his death.

We now call it the Heiligenstadt Testament, and it is one of the most devastating documents ever written by an artist about himself:

"You men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so... what a humiliation, when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing, and again I heard nothing."

He wrote, in the same letter, that he had thought of ending his life. And then he wrote the line that explains everything that followed:

"Only my art held me back. It seemed impossible to me to leave the world before I had produced everything I felt called upon to produce."

He went back to Vienna. He went on composing. Over the next two decades his hearing continued to fade. Friends began writing their words down in small notebooks instead of speaking them aloud, and waiting while he read. Modern scholars call these the conversation books. Around four hundred of them survive.

To compose, he developed his own methods. He bit one end of a wooden rod and pressed the other against the soundboard of his piano, letting the vibrations travel through his jaw to his inner ear. He had stumbled, through trial and error, onto the principle that modern science calls bone conduction.

The cause of his deafness has never been settled. What we do know is this: he realized he was losing his hearing at twenty-eight, and he could have stopped. He wrote the letter, he held the thought of dying in his hand, and then he put down the pen and went back to work.

Most of what he is remembered for was composed after that moment: The Fifth Symphony. The Seventh. The Ninth. The Missa Solemnis. The late quartets. All of it was made by a man who could no longer hear most of what he was writing.

There are people who give the world what they receive, and there are people who give the world what they were never able to receive. The most enduring beauty in human history has almost always come from the second kind...

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