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Deafness

Beethoven told the English pianist Charles Neate (in 1815) that his hearing loss began in 1798, during a heated quarrel with a singer. During its gradual decline, his hearing was further impeded by a severe form of tinnitus. As early as 1801, he wrote to Wegeler and another friend, Karl Amenda, describing his symptoms and the difficulties they caused in both professional and social settings (although it is likely some of his close friends were already aware of the issues). The cause was probably otosclerosis, possibly accompanied by degeneration of the auditory nerve.

On his doctor's advice, Beethoven moved to the small Austrian town of Heiligenstadt, just outside Vienna, from April to October 1802 in an attempt to come to terms with his condition. There he wrote the document now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers that records his thoughts of suicide due to his growing deafness and his resolution to continue living for and through his art. The letter was never sent and was discovered in his papers after his death. The letters to Wegeler and Amenda were not so despairing; in them Beethoven commented also on his ongoing professional and financial success at this period, and his determination, as he expressed it to Wegeler, to "seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely". In 1806, Beethoven noted on one of his musical sketches: "Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art."

Beethoven's hearing loss did not prevent him from composing music, but it made playing at concerts—an important source of income at this phase of his life—increasingly difficult. It also contributed substantially to his social withdrawal. Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until 1812. Beethoven never became totally deaf; in his final years, he was still able to distinguish low tones and sudden loud sounds.