Beethoven’s Letter About Suicide Is A Guide For Dealing With Adversity
The great composer teaches us how to fail and succeed in life’s ultimate trials
When I was twelve, doctors told me I needed major surgery on my spine, which would require a long recovery time. A few days before the operation, they gave me a note. It didn’t look special, but the cheap office paper with a generic font was soul-crushing.
Almost as an afterthought, a doctor mentioned it was a list of things I’d never be able to do for my entire life. Boom, that quick. It was like a door slammed in my face, taking away so many endless possibilities that power many of the dreams when you’re young.
I didn’t handle it well. For a time, I was a total prick and lashed out at whatever or whoever was in range. But over time, the limitations helped me by showing me other paths for creativity and growth. Recently, I relived all this again by reading another note from hundreds of years ago.
In 1802, on the verge of becoming the Western world’s greatest composer, Ludwig van Beethoven penned a letter about his serious contemplation of suicide. Suddenly, his future was in peril. The musician realized he was losing the one faculty that made his world possible — his hearing.
In what is now known as his Heiligenstadt Testament, a note to his brothers about the pain of his condition, Beethoven explains his hearing loss not only put his dreams in jeopardy but also ruined his ability to maintain friendships and social life. The musician tragically states:
“Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic…You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you…for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady…I was soon compelled to isolate myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’”
His letter expresses both despair and a path for perseverance. In a sense, it’s a good example of how to and how not to deal with the sudden crushing waves fate can throw at you. But it all makes more sense when you understand Beethoven.
His story starts in the city of Bonn.
Born Into Music
The documentary In Search of Beethoven reveals the future musician was born to a family of musicians in 1770. His father, Johann, and grandfather were court musicians for the electors of Bonn. So, the young Beethoven developed quickly.
Johann noticed his son had proficiency with the piano, so he found the best teachers in the city for the child.
The boy gave his first concert at seven. By thirteen, he created a piano concerto so complicated that a grey-haired professional pianist in the documentary struggles to play it.
By his early teens, Beethoven achieved a level of mastery where he could improvise and not just follow sheet music. Aristocrats in Bonn hired him to teach their children piano. Soon, Beethoven was in the court orchestra himself, playing works from geniuses of the time, Mozart and Joseph Haydn.
He was thought such a prodigy that a benefactor sent him to Vienna, the musical hub of Europe. But he came home two weeks later when his mother fell ill and died. Not long after, his younger sister also died. Their father started drinking heavily, so Beethoven became the head of the household in his mid-teens.
Afterward, he had a chance to meet Joseph Haydn. The legend was so impressed with Beethoven that he offered to tutor him in Vienna. The teen never left. By the 1790s, he was the preeminent keyboardist in Vienna and had enough stature to publish his work for a fee at twenty-four.
In the documentary, musicologist Giovanni Bietti says as Beethoven’s talents grew, he started creating music different than his heroes Mozart and Haydn. Where the latter used symmetry and harmony, Beethoven’s music was compressed, creating tension and suspense. At twenty-nine, he debuted his First symphony.
During this great triumph, his world started cracking apart.
Using Art To Survive
“How could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.” — Ludwig van Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, by 1800, Beethoven noticed significant problems with his hearing, and they weren’t going away. His life as a piano virtuoso had him entertaining at the houses of aristocracy and publicly challenging rivals in front of audiences.
But by 1802, he reached a breaking point and could no longer continue with his life as it was. The pain of losing his hearing terrified him. He began seriously entertaining thoughts of suicide, but one thing kept his will to live — music. In his letter, Beethoven says:
“I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me…Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so…Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready.”
The musician nearly disappeared from public appearances and focused on composing. He also changed from improvisation to pained, sketched-out compositions that required time and infinite changes.
By 1804, Beethoven produced his Third Symphony, an epic performance responding to his letter, proving he still had more to give. His hearing loss also forced him to approach music differently.
Taking Music To Its Base Elements
“The hearing impaired often hear only vibrations — poundings of the earth — when they experience music. Is that why so many of Beethoven’s compositions are stylized dances?” Music reduced to basic pulsations.”
— Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius
While not completely deaf until around 1819, Beethoven struggled with diminished hearing. In the book mentioned above, musician and professor of classical music theory Dr. Craig Wright explains how Beethoven found a workaround for his deficiency. He reduced music to “its basic elements,” or repetition.
One of his favorite devices was repeating a chord or theme over and over, just making it louder or changing the pitch a bit, producing a “tidal wave of sound.” Wright says Beethoven, like Mozart, developed an “inner ear” and discovered “musical sound.”
Like the repetition you hear in most pop dance hits in today’s music, Beethoven employed this in his pieces. In Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Wright reveals that “the composer repeats the same motif fifty-seven times in succession.”
While Beethoven started his musical journey sounding like Mozart and Joseph Haydn, he began creating truly original pieces of music unlike anything else of the time. He also needed no official position to sustain himself.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, patrons helped his music get performed and paid him to remain in Vienna and compose. This was the triumph in the face of his Heiligenstadt Testament, but it was intermixed with significant personal failure.
Embarrassment And Withdrawal
“For me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished…If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed.”
—Ludwig van Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament
While Beethoven didn’t kill himself and conquered his impairment in the professional realm, his personal life was torture, mainly due to himself. The documentary reveals the composer put himself into self-isolation.
He couldn’t get over how his deficiency would make him look in front of others. So, it was better to hide. Instead of explaining his deafness, he said nothing at all.
It created a bitterness within himself, which forced itself out onto others. This is something I could relate to. Moreover, to those who didn’t know, he could look aloof and arrogant by avoiding conversation.
He was known as a difficult person. This was only partly due to the hearing loss but more from his reaction to the world around him. While he called his Ninth Symphony an “Ode To Joy,” and wrote much uplifting, hopeful music, his personal life experienced none.
The documentary reveals that no housemaids or helpers stayed with him long, he didn’t have much of a social life, and potential wives showed little to no interest. He also had turbulent relations with his brothers.
While he found miraculous workarounds for his music, Beethoven put none of this effort into creating a happy social life. One wonders what his life would have been like if he had embraced his deficiency publicly instead of hiding it for as long as he could.
In all, his Heiligenstadt Testament gives us much to consider.
Taking What Fate Gives You
While that list of forbidden activities devastated me for a time, it also forced me to look in different directions, where I wouldn’t have before. Now, there was a reason to try them.
I found exercises that didn’t stress my spine.
Martial arts weren’t on that list specifically, so I spent twenty years doing that.
The opening also pushed me into books, eventually leading to writing. It’s the only reason you’re reading this article now.
Sometimes, our misfortunes are fate’s way of pointing you in a direction. Even if this isn’t true, it’s a better way to look at it. Beethoven is the ultimate example of this with his music, taking a crushing deficiency and using it to change the medium forever.
However, the complex composer also failed to use a similar attitude in his social life. He lived a life of misery and imposed the sentence on himself.
Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament is a teaching tool for the ages on dealing with the inevitable trials we’ll all face and the dangers of looking at them the wrong way. In my opinion, it’s something all young people should read.
-Originally posted on Medium 2/12/24