BEETHOVEN DEAF: THE BEETHOVEN MYTH AND
NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEAFNESS
By
DEVIN MICHAEL PAUL BURKE
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Master of Arts
Thesis Adviser: Dr. Francesca Brittan
Department of Music
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
May, 2010
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of
______________________________________________________
Devin Michael Paul Burke
candidate for the ________________________________degree
*.
M. A. in Music History
(signed)_______________________________________________
Dr. Francesca Brittan
(chair of the committee)
________________________________________________
Dr. Daniel Goldmark
________________________________________________
Dr. Georgia Cowart
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
(date) _______________________
4/2/10
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any
proprietary material contained therein.
Table of Contents
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................ 2 Abstract ................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1: The Heiligenstadt Testament, the Emerging Social Category of
“Deafness,” and the Dual Nature of Disability ......................................... 20 Private and Public Deafness and the Heiligenstadt Testament ..... 24 “Visualizing” Beethoven’s deafness ............................................. 41 Conclusions ................................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Richard Wagner’s Beethoven centenary essay and the social
construction of “normalcy” in the nineteenth century .............................. 54 Hearing perspectives ..................................................................... 59 Deaf history perspectives .............................................................. 63 Conclusion .................................................................................... 77 Chapter 3: The Beethoven Biopic and the Cinema of Isolation ........................... 79 Institutional biases against disability in film ................................ 81 The techniques of isolation ........................................................... 88 Conclusions ................................................................................. 106 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 113 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 114 1
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. 2, mm. 134-164 ................... 45
Figure 2. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 243-267 ............................ 48
Figure 3. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 316-344 ........................... 49
Figure 4. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 1-6 ...................................... 50
Figure 5. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 171-176 .............................. 51
Figure 6 Opening shot of Immortal Beloved ................................................................... 91
2
Beethoven Deaf: The Beethoven Myth and
Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Deafness
Abstract
by
DEVIN MICHAEL PAUL BURKE
In the late-eighteenth century, not long before Ludwig van Beethoven began to
experience the first symptoms of hearing loss, an important historical shift in the
understanding of deafness took place in Europe. This shift resulted from the birth of deaf
education, of the deaf community, and of deafness itself as a social category. The history
of deafness, and more broadly of disability, has been neglected by musicologists, and in
this thesis I map out points of intersection between Beethoven reception history and deaf
history to show that these histories can enlighten each other. I focus on three
“documents” of Beethoven reception—the Heiligenstadt Testament, Richard Wagner’s
1870 Beethoven essay, and twentieth-century Beethoven biopics—to show that
Beethoven has been used to normalize hearing and construct deafness as its pathological
opposite, even as his example shows that hearing loss does not negate music.
3
Introduction
Two essentially irreconcilable “models” for interpreting deafness lie at the heart
of a cultural debate concerning the deaf community. The first, most popularly labeled as
the Disability model, views deafness as a pathological defect, a deviation from the
“normal,” while the Linguistic Minority model views deafness as a different way of life,
and views the deaf community as a culture with a common language (sign language).
Any study of deafness must engage with the debate between these two points of view.
Deaf studies scholars have historically distinguished between the Disability and
Linguistic Minority models in their writing through the use of a capitalized Deaf to refer
to the latter model. The lower-case “deaf,” as in “deaf person,” usually refers to the
person’s medically-defined hearing ability, while the capitalized “Deaf” refers to the set
of shared values, behaviors, history, and traditions that constitute Deaf culture, as well as
to the people who actively live in that shared culture.1 The lower-case “deaf” can also be
used to describe the deaf community, in the definition suggested by Deaf historian Carol
Padden: “A deaf community may include persons who are not themselves Deaf, but who
actively support the goals of the community and work with Deaf people to achieve
them.”2
More broadly, the difference between the two views represents the gulf between
the hearing population and the deaf population. The Disability model is by far the
1
For a brief overview of this usage see the introduction to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Inside Deaf
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1-10.
2
As I am myself hearing, and an outsider to Deaf culture, I have tried to use the capitalized Deaf with
sensitivity and when in doubt, have used the lower-case orthography. See Carol Padden, “The Deaf
Community and the Culture of Deaf People,” in American Deaf Culture: An Anthology, ed. by Sherman
Wilcox (Burtonsville, Maryland: Linstok Press, 1989), 5.
4
dominant view of the hearing majority population, usually to the extent that it is taken for
granted as an intuitive, “natural” truth. The deaf community has fought for a wider
acceptance of the linguistic minority model, not the least because of its important
implications for public policies that affect millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. The
Linguistic Minority model recognizes sign language as a system of communication that
has all the expressive capabilities of spoken language. This view of sign language is
relatively new; in fact, one could say that it is fifty years old as of this year.
In 1960, linguist William Stokoe published a paper titled “Sign language
structures: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf.”3
Stokoe, who was a hearing man, had been teaching at Gallaudet University, and noticed
over time that the sign language used by his deaf students had a definite and unique
linguistic structure. The publication of his article, and his Dictionary of American Sign
Language in 1965, represented a watershed moment in the history of the deaf
community.4 Stokoe’s work demonstrated that sign language was not just a pale imitation
of spoken language, but that it was a unique form of linguistic expression. This finding
was also an important moment in the history of linguistics, because it has challenged
widely-accepted linguistic models. For deaf people, sign language had received an
unexpected legitimization, and it led to a renewed sense of community that has grown
ever since.
This new validation of sign language was especially important because sign
language had been widely banned in the teaching of deaf children for eighty years. The
3
William Stokoe, Jr., “Sign language structures: An outline of the visual communication systems of the
American deaf,” Studies in Linguistics: Occasional Papers 8 (Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and
Linguistics, University of Buffalo, 1960), 3-78.
4
William Stokoe, Jr., Carl Cronenberg, and Dorothy Casterline, Dictionary of American Sign Language
(Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press, 1965).
5
time between 1880 and 1960 is sometimes referred to in the deaf community as “the Dark
Ages.” In 1880, at the international congress of deaf educators in Milan, a group of deaf
educators (the vast majority of whom were hearing) imposed a ban on manual (sign)
language as a teaching tool. The purpose was to force deaf students to do their best to fit
in to “normal” society, but the effect was to ban the most natural way of communicating
for deaf people. This ban was philosophically tied to notions of progress, nationalism,
and eugenics, and one of its leading advocates was Alexander Graham Bell. Bell also
vehemently argued against allowing deaf people to marry each other in an effort to limit
deaf people’s reproductive rights, supporting his arguments with numerous “scientific”
studies. As an internationally recognized figure, Bell was able to exert a great deal of
influence on the rights of the deaf community in his time. He has since been referred to as
the “bogey man” of deaf history.
The emergence of the linguistic minority model, following the history of
eugenicist oppression that has significantly shaped the deaf community, has fueled efforts
to recover the deaf perspective in history. It is an undeniable fact that “deaf people”
emerged as a social category at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. This
emergence coincided with the birth of institutionalized deaf education, which brought
deaf people together to form communities. Deaf people from this time onwards sought to
define themselves as a community, even as a kind of nationality, by using many of the
same strategies as other nationalist leaders. At the beginning of the nineteenth century,
deaf communities, particularly in France and America, produced a new self-consciously
Deaf art and literature, established a new narrative of Deaf history, and turned sign
language into a cause as much as a means of communication. These attempts to establish
6
a quasi-national identity for the Deaf were threatening to many hearing people like Bell,
because they represented a rise in a new kind of “immigrant” population at a time when
hearing people were also trying to shore up nationalist unity within their borders.
Historians for the most part have failed to record this history, since the dominant
view of academia has been to define deaf people according to the Disability model—as a
group of people with a common defect, not a shared culture. (Just one example of this
bias is the fact that up until the year 2006, American Sign Language was listed in the
MLA Bibliography database as an “invented language,” along with the Klingon language
from Star Trek.5) Scholars in Deaf studies and in disability studies have done a great deal
of work to bring this history forward in recent years, and at the same time they have
created new frameworks for thinking about how and why these histories have or have not
been written. Many of the insights of these fields apply well to other studies of
marginalization, such as studies about race, class, or gender.
This thesis takes the work of Deaf and disability studies scholars as its starting
point for examining how deaf people, deafness, and the Deaf community have played a
role in music history. The study of Deaf history alongside music history reveals a rich set
of connections that has received very little scholarly attention. Generally, I have focused
on demonstrating ways in which the music community has constructed its notions of
normalcy using deafness as a negative pole, as the “absence,” or absent sense, of music.
As Lennard Davis, a pioneer scholar in the field of disability studies has written, the
study of disability is not so much a study of the construction of disability as it is a study
5
Lennard Davis, “Introduction,” in Disability Studies Reader (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), xvii.
7
of the construction of normalcy.6 A broad goal of the discipline is to ground constructions
of normalcy in the historical moments in which they were generated. “The social process
of disabling,” Davis explains, “arrived with industrialization and with the set of practices
and discourses that are linked to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of
nationality, race, gender, criminality, sexual orientation, and so on.”7 Similarly, this thesis
tries to ground the music community’s enforcement of the Disability model in the history
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ostensibly, Ludwig van Beethoven serves as the subject of this thesis. My
primary goal, however, is not to contribute yet another perspective on the image of the
great composer, but to examine the ways that the Beethoven mythology has been put to
work to reinforce the Disability model of deafness time and time again. The Beethoven
mythology is a useful fiction that, like all mythologies, joins together both truth and
untruth. The story of Beethoven’s struggle against his deafness justifies itself in part
through Beethoven’s own words and life story (above all through the Heiligenstadt
Testament, which will be discussed in the Chapter 1), but these words and biographical
details have been interpreted, reinterpreted, and over-interpreted (in Umberto Eco’s sense
of the word) many times to construct new narratives.8 All of these narratives have in
some way exploited stereotypes of disability and genius, turning Beethoven into the
poster-boy for the Romantic notion of the triumph of the mind and soul over the crippled
body.
6
Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Disability Studies Reader, 3.
7
Ibid., 1.
8
On over-interpretation, see Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), where Eco argues that the more sacred a text, the more willing interpreters are to
find connections in the text, or to fit the text into the interpretations they wish to find.
8
Although such narratives perpetuate these stereotypes, it would be futile to
suggest that we suppress the Beethoven myth altogether and ignore its power. As one
scholar asked me at a recent conference, am I recommending that we throw out
Beethoven’s story, when it has brought so much inspiration to countless people? The
answer is no, nor do I believe that this is possible. The story of Beethoven’s struggle
against deafness is so deeply embedded in our culture that I doubt it will ever fade far
from people’s awareness. Indeed, many great works of literature exploit stereotypes, and
we still read them.9 The difference is that we now read these works with a greater
awareness of the different perspectives that can inform our interpretations, and how those
perspectives do not represent “natural” truths but are generated in specific historical
moments. Similarly, I do not suggest that the Beethoven mythology is a purely negative
concentration of stereotypes; rather, I am merely suggesting that we look at it with a
greater awareness of the perspectives that have shaped it, and that are shaped by it.
Indeed, to consume—or teach—the mythology of Beethoven without thinking critically
about how it operates in the context of social understandings of deafness is to implicitly
endorse the Disability model of deafness.
It is not my goal to engage the reader in the debate on whether the Disability
model or Linguistic Minority models are appropriate ways of thinking about deafness. I
merely wish to deconstruct the ways in which the music community, through Beethoven,
has consistently acted on behalf of the Disability model. Deafness, for music historians,
has been defined almost exclusively as a defect, and the logic of this is simple. Music
(when defined as an art that engages the ear only) stands to gain more than any other
9
The works of Rudyard Kipling, or Huckleberry Finn, come to mind; Heart of Darkness maintains a place
on educational reading lists, despite the fact that Chinua Achebe has described to us how blatantly racist the
work reads to Africans.
9
facet of culture in a society where hearing is defined as “normal.” In the classical music
community especially, hearing is often not merely defined as “normal,” but as an
elevated sense through which transcendental listening is possible. This elevated view of
music listening was born in the nineteenth century and solidified by the work of people
like Heinrich Schenker. The cultural valorization of hearing as a high art requires the
maintenance of the Disability model as the dominant view of deafness. A view of Deaf
culture as a legitimate way of life thus undermines the very idea of the universality of
music, as music is taught today.
Chapter 1 discusses Beethoven and the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, and
examines what it meant in the context of the early nineteenth century to commit the act
Beethoven was most afraid of—to “come out” as a deaf person. I suggest that we should
look at Beethoven’s deafness as both a private experience and a socially-conferred
identity, and examine the way scholarship to date has dealt with this dual nature of
deafness. In this chapter, I also begin to discuss ways in which deafness is often
“marked” visually by the hearing population. The visual identification of deafness, or
disability in general, is an important aspect of marginalization, because visual identifiers
(e.g. crutches, a white cane, a hearing aid) help people who consider themselves nondisabled to quickly recognize who fits into the category of “normal” and who does not. I
also examine examples of music analyses in Chapter 1 that have attempted to reveal
visual signs of deafness in Beethoven’s music scores.
In Chapter 2, I discuss Wagner’s extended essay Beethoven, written in 1870 to
commemorate both the Beethoven centenary and the unification of Germany. The
document is an important one for the reception of Beethoven’s deafness. In it, Wagner
10
renarrativizes Beethoven’s deafness by arguing that it freed his genius from the
distractions of society. Wagner was the first to suggest that Beethoven’s late works are
his greatest because they were written during Beethoven’s period of “total deafness,” and
this opinion has continued to hold sway in Beethoven reception. The essay also argues
that Beethoven embodies the German spirit, and is a redemptive force for the German
people. I argue that public conceptions of deafness in the nineteenth century have
unacknowledged relevance to Wagner’s essay, and can help to shed some light questions
that have puzzled musicologists about the essay.
In Chapter 3, I discuss Beethoven filmic biographies (biopics), taking a set of
examples from early cinema to the present day. These films serve as both useful and
problematic documents for the study of deafness and Beethoven because they force the
public and private worlds of deafness to come together on screen. In film, it is impossible
simply to marginalize deafness to a private realm; we also see deafness performed. At the
same time, these films take great pains to visualize and marginalize deafness, often using
extreme and ridiculous means to maintain an image of the isolated deaf composer that has
been perpetuated since the nineteenth century. These extreme measures have been
negatively received by critics. I argue that these films construct deafness as private for
two main reasons: because hearing normative society has continually marginalized
deafness to the private sphere, and because film is an inherently able-bodied medium that
has a long history of constructing disability as “Other.”
Throughout this thesis, I have used a variety of methodologies and perspectives to
examine Beethoven and deafness in music. My reasoning behind this approach is
twofold: first, in a document of this length, I cannot achieve any kind of comprehensive
11
approach, even if I were to limit this study to one or two perspectives. Therefore, I have
decided to consider at deafness and Beethoven using a kind of survey of methods; this
approach anticipates a longer and much more in-depth examination of this subject, to be
forthcoming. My second reason for using a survey-like approach is to demonstrate that
the study of disability has relevance to a variety of perspectives. I believe that many of
the perspectives discussed in this thesis can be used to look at other areas of disability in
music history study beyond Beethoven.
In fact, it is exciting to acknowledge that many of these perspectives are already
being explored in the emerging field of music and disability studies. The 2010 CUNY
Symposium on Music and Disability provided a preview of some of the work that will
undoubtedly have a positive impact on musicology and the music community in general
in the coming years. The treatment of deafness in the music community represents a
particularly thorny issue, and one that is a long time in coming. This fact has been
recognized by scholars such as Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor, editors of the 2007
essay collection Silence, Music, Silent Music. In their introduction, they include this
footnote:
The absence of a chapter on the experience of music and silence in relation to hearing loss and
deafness may strike the reader as notable; the extensive literature in the fields of medicine and
deaf Studies has not been paralleled in any way in musicological literature, after all. Either we
could have explored the obvious (Beethoven, Evelyn Glennie…); or, we could have explored
ways in which people who are profoundly deaf from birth experience vibration as
music…However, after giving it deep thought, we decided that this potentially enormous topic
could not be covered in a meaningful way in a single chapter. It is a subject that deserves a book10
length study of its own.
In this thesis, I am “exploring the obvious.” Beethoven represents an obvious
starting point for this research because he is the most famous musician who experienced
10
Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor, eds, Silence, Music, Silent Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing
Company, 2007), 4.
12
hearing loss and—ironically—because his fame resulted in large part from this disability.
It is important to contextualize Beethoven’s deafness, to ask how his deafness is situated
historically, and this is the primary aim of this thesis. It is my hope that two new
perspectives on Beethoven and deafness might become more widespread in future
scholarship. First, Beethoven scholarship in general could focus less, when it deals with
deafness at all, on trying to find the equivalent of messages stuck in bottles and launched
across the ocean of “silence.” It is always tempting to argue that certain works are
messages about or direct results of Beethoven’s deafness. This type of musicology
perpetuates the image of Beethoven as marooned by deafness. Some scholars have
already been problematizing this image from various angles, but this is difficult to do
without the analytical framework by which to understand deafness as anything but an
isolating force. The work being done on music and disability holds much promise in this
area.
Second, I hope that scholars, educators, and musicians will begin to think of
Beethoven’s deafness as a complex phenomenon, rather than simply a kind of on/off
switch. The facile use of phrases like “by this time he was already deaf,” or “how ironic
that he could not hear this work,” seen everywhere from scholarship to liner notes,
reduces both deafness and hearing to a crude “to hear or not to hear” experience. It
describes a more socially constructed understanding of deafness as the metaphorical
“opposite” of hearing, rather than any deaf person’s experience of hearing. It also glosses
over the evidence that Beethoven’s hearing loss progressed in an irregular manner rather
than anything resembling a “grand decrescendo.” (This idea of the gradual descent into
total deafness was popularized by Wagner’s Beethoven centenary essay, which I discuss
13
in Chapter 2). Furthermore, George Thomas Ealy has shown that with his hearing aids,
Beethoven likely could hear passably throughout his adult life.11
While Beethoven is the obvious starting point for a discussion of music and
deafness, he is by no means the only starting point—he is merely the most conspicuous.
This thesis could have approached the subject by picking apart how the ways that
deafness and music have interacted rhetorically. References to deafness and music often
occur in moments of liminality where the boundaries of one or the other, or both, come in
to question. The ways that music and deafness have been used to define each other is
deserving of an entire book in of itself. Here, I will simply provide a few examples.
Discussions of autonomous music sometimes invoke deafness, especially in
regards to the experience of listening. Autonomous music is sometimes described as
making the listener “feel” deaf; in a sense, by posing as an object of contemplation, the
autonomous artwork renders the listener an unreceptive object as well. Lawrence Kramer
invokes deafness in this way:
For me music has gradually become the labyrinth of another voice, threading those chambers of
the ear that wind and unwind into every distance, that turn inside out to become the whorled
spaces of the world, of other voices, another voice. Deaf to the autonomous artwork, I can finally
hear the music. And when music "itself" solicits my deafness, asks me to hear it as the
autonomous artwork, the sound only grates on me, gravels, scores the unwalled labyrinth with
12
acoustic graffiti.
In a similar vein, Peter Szendy, in his recent book on the history of listening,
describes the act of listening to an autonomous artwork as “total listening,” and asks how
this type of listening might be considered a type of “deafness”:
11
George Thomas Ealy, “Of Ear Trumpets and a Resonance Plate: Early Hearing Aids and Beethoven’s
Hearing Perception,” 19th-Century Music 17/3 (Spring, 1994), 262-273.
12
Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 230.
14
It seems that deafness is the exact obverse to total listening, totally subject to the structural law of
the work. Listening askew here becomes, if not impossible, at least unpardonable in law. But since
the equals sign that Wagner implicitly draws between deafness and total listening is reversible, we
are right to wonder, in turn, if this total listening isn’t precisely a form of deafness on the part of
the listener. To listen without any wandering, without ever letting oneself be distracted by “the
noises of life,” is that still listening? …Shouldn’t a responsible listening (which can account for
itself as well as for the work, rather than simply respond to an authoritative law) always be
13
wavering?
The objectification of music into the autonomous artwork, and the corresponding
objectification of the listener, has historical echoes in the treatment of deaf people as
mechanistic, automaton-like people. Carolyn Abbate has written about this treatment of
deaf people in the context of mechanical music and music box culture. In her book In
Search of Opera, she quotes this 1715 passage:
Jean de la Porte Napolitan, author of a treatise on natural magic and a great musician, tells us that
by means of artificial music, one can teach the mute to speak and sing, even when deaf from birth;
he had several experiences of this nature, as he informs us, saying that, in playing some musical
instrument, one need only have the deaf person hold the neck between his teeth, and immediately
one sees him tremble with joy, and one easily comprehends that he hears; he claims that the
sounds reach the brain by means of two orifices that are located above the soft palate, and thus
make themselves heard;… all these facts should not appear at all surprising to those who have
some notion of the art of mechanics, since, by its principles, one can make inanimate figures sing,
14
and instruments play themselves.
This formulation of deafness links it metaphorically to not only a lack of understanding,
but also a lack of humanity. Human beings have been traditionally defined as hearing,
and there are many examples of deafness being invoked to describe the absence of
humanity in an animal, machine, or dead thing. In the following example, written in 1863
13
Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of our ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121-122.
“Jean de la Porte Napolitan, Auteur d’un Traité de la Magic naturelle, & grand Musicien, dis que c’est
par le moyen de la Musique artificielle, qu’on peut apprendre à un muet à parler & à chanter, quoique sourd
de naissance, dont il a fait plusiers experiences, ainsi qu’il l’enseigne, en distant qu’il n’y a, en jouant de
quelque Instrument de musique, qu’à en faire mordre la manche à un sourd, & que sur le champ on le voit
tressaillir de joye, & on conçoit aisément qu’il entend; il pretend que les sons se portent au cerveau par les
deux orifices que nous avons au dessus du palais, & se font entendre;…tous ces faits ne paroîtront point
surprenans à ceux qui ont quelques notions de l’art mécanique, puisque, par ces principles, on peut faire
chanter des figures inanimées, & faire jouer des Instrumens tout seuls, comme je l’ai déjà dit” (Pierre
Bourdelet and Pierre Bonnet, Histoire de la musique et ses effets [Paris, 1715; facsimile reprint, Graz:
Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966], 59) Quoted and translated in Carolyn Abbate, In Search of
Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 245.
14
15
by James Hawkins, a British physician, deaf people are compared to mollusks and adders,
and music is referenced to describe the type of sound that is beyond their perception:
The insusceptibility of the deaf and dumb to the least idea of regulated sound, renders them utterly
incapable of acquiring any knowledge of music. What has been said by a naturalist of the Molluscs
is equally applicable to them: “They hear nothing of the marvellous inflections of speech, the
tremulous tenderness of affection, the harsh trumpet-tones of strife, the musical intonations of
mirth… Deafer than the deafest adder they will remain, charm we never so wisely. Equally
insensible must they be of music. Beethoven’s melodious thunder, Handel’s choral might,
Mozart’s tender grace, Bellini’s languorous sweetness are even more lost on them than on the
sympathetic dowagers in the grand tier, who chatter audibly of guipure and the last drawing room,
while Grisi’s impassioned expression, and Mario’s cantabile are entrancing the rest of the
15
audience.”
Interestingly enough, in the passage immediately prior to this one, Hawkins
criticizes John Bulwer’s 1648 work Philocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Friend (a
very early landmark text in the history of literature on deafness). Hawkins writes that
Bulwer’s ideas on sign language and deaf education “though highly ingenious, were by
no means philosophical or scientific, as he speaks of their ability to acquire knowledge of
music through the vibration of sonorous bodies.”16 Here, we see that the understanding of
deafness, and of the access of the deaf to music, is mediated by time, place, and culture.
In 1648, music and deafness were not antitheses; in 1863, proposing such a connection
demonstrated a lack of scientific or philosophical approach.
These few examples are just the tip of the iceberg. There are also a great number
of examples from past and present music scholarship that discuss deafness in terms that
would be unthinkable to someone who is at all sensitive to Deaf culture. Here is one such
passage: this from Richard Taruskin, taken from his critique of Carolyn Abbate’s fourth
chapter in Unsung Voices on “operatic deafness.” In her chapter, Abbate suggests that the
15
James Hawkins, The Physical, Moral, and Intellectual Constitution of the Deaf and Dumb: some
practical and general remarks concerning their education, (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts,
& Green, 1863), 8. Hawkins cites a Sept. 1857 issue of Blackwood as the source for the excerpt in
quotation marks.
16
Ibid., 8.
16
assumption that operatic characters cannot hear the music of the opera “constitutes a
basic perceptual code in hearing and viewing opera.”17 Taruskin responds:
“In opera,” chapter 4 begins, “the characters pacing the stage often suffer from deafness; they do
not hear the music that is the ambient fluid of their music-drowned world.” But surely deafness is
the inability to hear something one is meant to hear, and these ambient sounds (qua sounds) are
meant not for them but for us; thus the many pages Abbate devotes to exploring deafness-anxiety
as a source of operatic fascination (though it leads her very smoothly into her excellent Mahler
discussion) ring quite false in my ear. She retreats a little: “We must generally assume, in short,
that this music is not produced by or within the stage-world, but emanated from other loci as
secret commentaries for our ears alone, and that characters are generally unaware that they are
singing.” But the retreat is unavailing: unawareness, like deafness, implies a defect, and we do not
18
generally assume that operatic characters are defective.
Taruskin’s discussion of deafness, from a deaf community perspective, is alternately
offensive (“deafness implies a defect”) and illogical (“deafness is the inability to hear
something one is meant to hear”). The disparity between these descriptions of deafness
and the real world experiences of deafness (and the fact that no qualification of that
disparity seems warranted) demonstrates clearly how disenfranchised the deaf
community is from the discourse of the musical community. While many deaf people
may have no interest in engaging with the musical community, due its long history of
exclusionary orientations towards deaf people, it is wrong to assume that the musical
community has nothing to offer to the deaf community.
I can illustrate this point with a personal experience, and one that is directly
responsible for both changing my life and inspiring my work on deafness and music. In
2002, while in school as an undergraduate music theory and composition major at
Lawrence University, I received a commission to write a piece for voice and saxophone
quartet. Not long after I received the commission, I attended a church where I saw a
woman interpreting the service in exceptionally beautiful sign language. For the first time
17
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119.
Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008), 415.
18
17
I saw sign language in a new way, as something more than a distracting visual
supplement to the speaker. The fact that I noticed her was probably due to my discovery
at about the same time of Oliver Sacks’s book Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of
the Deaf. Newly fascinated by sign language and Deaf culture, I decided to write the
piece for saxophone quartet and sign-language performer rather than for sung voice. As
luck would have it, the woman I had seen interpreting the church service agreed to work
with me, and we ended up collaborating on the piece for over six months. During that
time, she taught me a great deal about sign language, the deaf community and Deaf
culture, and the musicality of gesture.19 Through working with her, the music I wrote was
inspired by the signs themselves. At the premiere, she invited many people from the local
deaf community. We provided balloons to both the deaf and hearing members of the
audience, so that everyone could feel the vibrations of the music by holding the balloons
in their hands. This collaboration and concert made it clear that music—when we think of
it as a means of communicating and bringing people together, and not as an merely as an
object of contemplation—can touch anyone, including those who are often defined as
beyond the “reach” of music. The joy of seeing two communities, the musical and the
deaf, who are often considered mutually exclusive come together has inspired my work
ever since.
The overall objective of this thesis is to continue the work of that concert by
helping to foster a greater degree of mutual understanding between members of the deaf
19
The study of musical gesture and its relation to sign language as it developed in the deaf community is a
subject ripe for further study. See for example Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in
Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Sarah Hibberd, “Magnetism,
Muteness, Magic: Spectacle and the Parisian Lyric Stage ca. 1830” (Diss., University of Southampton,
1998) as well as Hibberd’s recent book; and a wealth of literature in the fields of music therapy and music
education.
18
and hearing communities (especially the music community). Increased mutual
understanding may also challenge us to ask how the musical community answers the
question “Who has a right to music?” The heroic image of Beethoven has certainly
inspired many people, and drawn many people into the music community, but this same
image also reinforces an exclusionary model of the deaf community. Musicians with
hearing loss like Beethoven, Evelyn Glennie, and the deaf rock band “Beethoven’s
Nightmare” (which has been playing together for over thirty years) all disprove the
assumption that anyone who qualifies in our society as “deaf” requires a superhuman feat
of will in order enjoy music as a composer, performer, or listener.
19
Chapter 1: The Heiligenstadt Testament, the Emerging Social
Category of “Deafness,” and the Dual Nature of Disability
“I am deaf.” [Ich bin Taub.] Beethoven wrote these words twice in the years 1801
and 1802, as he was beginning to accept the idea that his hearing would never return in
full. He first wrote them in the famous June 29, 1801, letter in which he, likely for the
first time, discussed his hearing difficulties with someone other than his doctors. In this
first tentative “confession,” three years after he began to notice symptoms, he was
beginning to acknowledge the potential of a change in identity, from a “hearing person”
to a “deaf person.”
The addressee of that letter was Franz Gerhard Wegeler, Beethoven’s childhood
friend and an ideal confidante for this potentially damaging secret: he was trained in
medicine, was a trusted friend, and was relatively removed from the Viennese circles that
contained, most importantly, Beethoven’s competitors.20 In the letter, Beethoven wrote
these famous lines:
I can say I am living a wretched life; for two years I have avoided almost all social gatherings
because it is impossible for me to say to people: “I am deaf.” If I belonged to any other profession
it would be easier, but in my profession it is an awful state, the more since my enemies, who are
21
not few, what would they say?
The words “I am deaf” in this case, for Beethoven clearly refer, not to his own private
experience with hearing loss, but to an imagined new public identity as a “deaf person”
that Beethoven feared would become a reality. If we ask, “what might it have meant for
20
In the letter, Beethoven also asked Wegeler to communicate with Beethoven’s doctors in Vienna about
his condition.
21
“Ich kann sagen, ich bringe mein Leben elend zu, seit 2 Jahren fast meide ich alle gesellschaften, weils
mir nun nicht möglich ist, den Leuten zu sagen, ich bin Taub, hätte ich irgend ein anderes Fach, so giengs
noch eher, aber in meinem Fach ist das ein schrecklicher Zustand, dabey meine Feinde, deren Anzahl nicht
geringe ist, was würden diese hiezu sagen –“ Quoted and translated in Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The
Life of Ludwig van Beethoven: Vol. 1 [1866], ed. Henry Edward Krehbiel, (New York: The Beethoven
Association, 1921), 300.
20
Beethoven to say publically ‘I am deaf’?” the answer would have to reflect not only the
experience of his hearing loss but also the way that deafness was understood in Vienna at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. The distinction, between private experience and
public identity, presents a problem that is particularly relevant to any discussion of
disability. It is also a distinction that has been little recognized in Beethoven scholarship.
Such a distinction has been recognized in other disciplines, however, and most
importantly, in the field of disability studies. Lennard J. Davis, a pioneering disability
studies scholar, explains the need for its recognition and study: “in the task of rethinking
and theorizing disability, one of the first steps is to understand the relationship between a
physical impairment and the political, social, even spatial environment that places that
impairment in a matrix of meanings and significations.”22 Davis’s work on the cultural
history of the deaf community has certainly opened up new ways of considering
disability; these new ideas can help us to reconsider the nature and meanings of
Beethoven’s deafness.
The distinction between the private experience and public identity of deafness
forms the foundation for the two main arguments in this chapter. First, I will show the
importance of the fact that deafness, for Beethoven, was essentially two “deafnesses,” the
private and the public. This dual nature of disability is experienced by anyone who has a
particular characteristic and lives in a culture that marks that characteristic as different or
outside the norm. The private experience and the public identity bestowed by that
“marking” characteristic are in some ways inseparable, of course, but they can and need
to be considered separately in order to better understand how individuals and
communities create meanings for disability. For this study of Beethoven, I will begin to
22
Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 3.
21
historicize turn-of-the-century European, and particularly German, attitudes towards
deafness and deaf people, in order to help to de-essentialize deafness and make the
distinction between private and public deafness more discernible. For this study, it is
particularly important to understand at the outset that in the late-eighteenth century, “deaf
people” had only recently begun to emerge as an identifiable social category.
The second argument of this chapter follows from the first; I will look at music
scholars’ repeated attempts to “visualize” Beethoven’s deafness, and I will examine how
the ways that scholars have done this have been shaped by the unacknowledged
distinction between the private and public aspects of Beethoven’s deafness. By the notion
of “visualizing” deafness, I am referring to the many attempts to produce a “text” and
suggest that it in some way captures Beethoven’s experience of deafness. These texts—
which include written language, musical notation, and images—are often, but not always
visual in nature; in this first chapter, I discuss music analysts who have tried to locate
deafness in the sounds of Beethoven’s late music. Therefore, I am using the term “text”
in the sense of an object that can be analyzed, and it follows that my use of the term
“visualizing deafness” includes any attempt to locate signs of deafness in an object.
At times, the term “materializing deafness” may seem more appropriate; however,
I have chosen to use “visualizing deafness” in its broader sense rather than alternating
terms because the term visualization invokes several important concepts in regards to
how able-bodied society has dealt with deafness. First, because deafness is an invisible
disability, it causes anxiety on the part of hearing people, and a common response to this
anxiety is to render deafness visible somehow, to bring it out into the open. Second,
visible signifiers of deafness are part of the process of visually identifying disability; they
22
function in ways similar to wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, and the like. Third, the
process of visualizing is a move towards taking it out of time, towards turning into a
static image rather than a performed, fluctuating event. Finally, the term visualize implies
the “normalizing gaze,” as Foucault described it: “It is a normalizing gaze…that makes it
possible to qualify, to classify and to punish.”23 The examples that I discuss in each of the
chapters in this thesis—musical analyses, musical programs, and Beethoven biopics—all
normalize in some way a hearing perspective on deafness.
The ultimate purpose of attempts to “visualize” deafness is to contain the “threat”
of deafness. In this chapter, I will show that the hearing community, when confronted
with deafness, defines itself as the locus of reason, and deafness as something “uncanny”
and irrational, i.e. the locus of experience beyond reason. Deafness, in this configuration,
is equated with a kind of experiential subjectivity against hearing’s material objectivity,
and in these analyses, we see repeated attempts to somehow “materialize” Beethoven’s
subjectivity in notation. The common assumption is that if one can successfully attach
some kind of text to this drastic experience, then we can begin to make “factual”
statements about what Beethoven could and could not hear. If we can read, in effect,
Beethoven’s hearing, in turn we can then begin to situate the physical impairment more
precisely into a narrative. A survey of these texts show little mention of the difference
between private and public deafness, and in addition, for a number of reasons, these texts
focus overwhelmingly on Beethoven’s private experience of deafness while ignoring
deafness as a public identity.
23
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 2005),
184.
23
Private and Public Deafness and the Heiligenstadt Testament
In 1801, deafness was still for Beethoven a private experience. He maintained
hope that he would not have to reveal his deafness publically; for the time being, his
hearing loss was concealable (or at least, so he thought).24 Beethoven says in the same
June 29 letter to Wegeler that “it seems singular that there are people who do not notice
my condition at all, attributing it to my absent-mindedness.”25 Of course, he had also
taken measures to conceal his deafness, and himself, from the public eye, in part because,
since he still felt some hope that his hearing would return, this self-isolation was
potentially only temporary. In a letter to Karl Amenda, dated July 1, 1801, he wrote “Oh,
how happy would I be if my hearing were completely restored…Yes, Amenda, if my
infirmity shows itself to be incurable in half a year, I shall appeal to you; you must
abandon everything and come to me.”26
What Beethoven feared the most, it seems, was the moment when he would have
to reveal in public that he was deaf. He knew that his enemies and critics would use
deafness against him, and if he could have kept his deafness a secret, especially from
those who had something to gain by his humiliation, then according to him, his life would
have been easier. Although he never discussed the possibility, he probably imagined a
scenario where his deafness would progress to the point that it would have to be made
public, after which period his hearing would be regained. He was very interested in
hearing of stories of deaf people, and especially the stories of those who were cured; in
24
Thayer notes that in 1802, “in truth, the secret so jealously guarded was already known—but who could
inform [Beethoven] of it?—though not long nor generally.” Ibid., 351.
25
Ibid., 300.
26
“O wie glücklich wäre ich jezt, wenn ich mein vollkommnes Gehör hätte… Ja Amenda wenn nach einem
halben Jahre mein Üebel unheilbar wird, dann mache ich Anspruch auf dich, dann must du alles Verlassen
und zu mir kommen.” Ibid., 298.
24
his November 16, 1801, follow-up letter to Wegeler, Beethoven wrote, “miracles are told
of galvanism; what have you to say about it? A doctor told me that he had seen a deaf and
dumb child recover his hearing (in Berlin)— and a man who had been deaf seven years
got well.”27 If he had moments where he thought it likely that he would regain his full
hearing, he would still have had reason to fear public acknowledgement of his deafness.
It is likely that the stigma of deafness would have been more difficult to remove than the
hearing loss. Beethoven asks in his letter, “my enemies, who are not few, what would
they say?” The answer is that his enemies and critics would likely have continued to
question whether or not he could fully hear. Undoubtedly, he would have had to submit
to a number of “scientific” tests to prove to the public that his aural abilities had returned
in full, and even then it is likely that not everyone would have been convinced, depending
on their feelings towards Beethoven.
Even after successful tests, the stigma would have been challenging to erase fully,
for two main reasons: because deafness has no visible outward manifestation and
therefore no visible sign of having been cured, and because deafness was very little
understood by the medical community, and even less by the public.28 In the Germanspeaking lands especially, deafness was considered an impediment to morality, outside
rationality, and surrounded by superstition.
We know from his letters that Beethoven saw the public acknowledgment of his
hearing loss as a kind of point-of-no-return, and of course, we have the Heiligenstadt
27
“Man spricht Wunder vom Galwanism was sagst du dazu? – ein Medeziner sagte mir er habe ein
Taubstummes Kind sehen sein Gehör wieder erlangen in Berlin, und einen Mann der ebenfalls sieben Jahr
taub gewesen, und sein Gehör wieder erlangt habe –“ Ibid., 302.
28
A quick survey of some of the remedies that Beethoven’s doctors suggested to him for his deafness
illustrates how little medical understanding of deafness there was in Vienna (and in the rest of Europe):
cold baths, lukewarm Danube baths, taking almond oil, “a kind of tea,” and vesicatories of bark from the
Daphne Mezereum tree which were placed on Beethoven’s arms for a few days at a time (which Beethoven
describes as a very unpleasant remedy). Ibid., 302.
25
Testament to attest to the fact that Beethoven had reached what he felt was such a
moment by 1802. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, he writes the words Ich bin Taub for
the second time, using them in almost the exact same phrase as he had written in the letter
to Wegeler. The key difference is that in the letter, the intended reader was a private
confidante for whom Beethoven was describing the “coming-out” moment, while the
Heiligenstadt Testament is the enactment, at least a kind of abstract enactment given that
Beethoven never showed the document to anyone, of that moment.30 It is addressed to the
public, although whether to a public of people he knew or to the public of posterity it is
unclear. The description of his coming-out moment is now fleshed out; the intent of the
document and its rhetoric become more transparent. Here is a brief excerpt from the
beginning of the Testament:
O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do ye
wrong me, you do not know the secret causes of my seeming, from childhood my heart and mind
were disposed to the gentle feeling of good will, I was even eager to accomplish great deeds, but
reflect now that for 6 years I have been in a hopeless case, aggravated by senseless physicians,
cheated year after year in the hope of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a
lasting malady (whose cure will take years or, perhaps, be impossible), both with an ardent and
lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was compelled early to isolate
myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed
by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for me to say to men
speak louder, shout, for I am deaf, Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense
which should have been more perfect in me than in other, a perfection such as few surely in my
profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed—O I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me
draw back when I would gladly mingle with you, my misfortune is doubly painful because it
31
must lead to my being misunderstood…
30
A discussion of Beethoven’s “coming-out” within a broader queer theory framework is a discussion
waiting to happen, but it is beyond the scope the present document.
31
“O ihr Menschen die ihr mich für Feindseelig störisch oder Misantropisch haltet oder erkläret, wie
unrecht thut ihr mir, ihr wißt nicht die geheime ursache von dem, was euch so scheinet, mein Herz und
mein Sinn waren von Kindheit an für das zarte Gefühl des Wohlwollens, selbst große Handlungen zu
verrichten dazu war ich immer aufgelegt, aber bedenket nur daß seit 6 Jahren ein heilloser Zustand mich
befallen, durch unvernünftige Ärtze verschlimmert, von Jahr zu Jahr in der Hofnung gebessert zu warden,
betrogen, endlich zu dem überblick eines daurenden Übels <das> (dessen Heilung vieleicht Jahre dauren
oder gar unmöglich ist) gezwungen, mit einem feurigen Lebhaften Temperamente gebohren selbst
empfänglich für die Zerstreuungen der Gesellschaft, muste ich früh much absondern, einsam mein Leben
zubringen, wollte ich auch zuweilen mich einmal über alles das hinaussezen, o wie hart wurde ich dur[ch]
die verdoppelte traurige Erfahrung meines schlechten Gehör’s dann zurückgestoßen, und doch war’s mir
noch nicht möglich den Menschen zu sagen: sprecht lauter, schreyt, denn ich bin Taub, ach wie wär es
möglich daß ich <den> die Schwäche eines Sinnes angeben sollte, der bey mir in einem Vollkommenern
26
I have bolded Beethoven’s multiple uses of the word “doubly” because it is important to
notice that he does not just mean that his bad hearing is “twice as sad,” but that it
represents two kinds of tragedy: the private experience and the public stigma. When he
writes that his “misfortune is doubly painful because it must lead to my being
misunderstood,” he is speaking expressly about the public stigma of deafness as much as
or more than the practicalities of communicating with hearing loss. Beethoven lists some
of these day-to-day challenges in communicating with hearing loss in the Testament,
where he declares that “for me there can be no recreation in society of my fellows,
refined intercourse, mutual exchange of thought.” These are not only day-to-day
challenges, however, but tropes particularly rooted in German Enlightenment attitudes
about deaf people, who were believed to live by definition outside of rational thought. As
Beethoven got older, Beethoven’s fears of isolation would prove to be largely unfounded;
the conversation books provide just one visual record of Beethoven’s continued mutual
exchange of thought.
The Heiligenstadt Testament, as moving a document as it is, leaves us with more
questions than answers. The circumstances of its writing remain unclear; we know that
Beethoven wrote it on October 6, 1802, then added a postscript on October 10. The
instigating factor for the document, as mentioned explicitly in the text, is the lack of
improvement in Beethoven’s hearing. His doctor had sent him to a quiet village to rest his
ears, to apparently no avail. A second factor may have been the improvement of other
Grade als bey andern seyn sollte, einen Sinn den ich einst in der grösten Vollkommenheit besaß, in einer
Vollkommenheit, wie ihn wenige von meinem Fache gewiß haben noch gehabt haben—o ich kann es night,
drum verzeiht, wenn ihr mich da zurückweichen sehen werdet, wo ich mich gerne unter euch mischte,
doppelt Wehe thut mir mein unglück, indem ich dabey verkannt warden muß.” Ibid., 352-353.
27
areas of Beethoven’s health; his doctors had speculated that the hearing loss was
somehow related to his bowel troubles, and there are a number of references in the letters
where Beethoven notes disappointedly that his bowel troubles are improving while his
hearing is not. In the July 1, 1801 letter to Karl Amenda, Beethoven confesses,
Know that my noblest faculty, my hearing, has greatly deteriorated. When you were still with me I
felt the symptoms but kept silent; now it is continually growing worse, and whether or not a cure
is possible has become a question; but it is said to be due to my bowels and so far as they are
32
concerned I am nearly restored to health.
While the Heiligenstadt Testament clearly contains elements that show Beethoven
meant it for both a personal and public readership, it is significant that scholars continue
to debate to what extent it is a private vs. public document. I would argue that this debate
is related to the dual private/public nature of disability itself, and the question of whether
it is primarily a private experience or a public one. The persistence of scholarship that
argues the Heiligenstadt Testament is more of a private document in part reflects the
anxiety about deafness, and a desire to connect more strongly Beethoven’s deafness with
a private, subjective experience.
As many scholars have noted, the debate over the personal/public document
question will likely never be resolved.33 Lewis Lockwood calls the Heiligenstadt
Testament “one of the most moving statements by an artist ever made,” and describes it
as “a private narrative of his suffering and of his determination to overcome suicidal
32
“Wisse, daß ich <den <für mich> bey> mir der edelste<n> Theil mein Gehör sehr abgenommen hat,
schon damals als du noch bey mir warst, fühlte ich davon spuren, und ich verschwieg's, nun ist es immer
ärger geworden, ob es wird wieder können Geheilt werden, das steht noch zu erwarten, es soll von den
Umständen meines Unterleibs <herrürhen> herrühren, was nun den betrift, so bin ich fast ganz hergestellt.”
Ibid., 297-298.
33
Lewis Lockwood puts it most succinctly when he notes that the Heiligenstadt Testament “has had many
interpreters, from Schindler to our time, and will have many more. No serious study of Beethoven can pass
it over without comment.” Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York, London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2003), 115.
28
impulses and fulfill his artistic destiny.”34 Thayer provides a somewhat more nuanced
interpretation: in describing the circumstances surrounding Beethoven’s authorship of the
Testament, he indirectly supports a more personal, perhaps less-premeditated
interpretation. At the same time, he downplays somewhat the gravity of Beethoven’s
description of deafness by arguing that Beethoven’s seclusion from public life in
Heiligenstadt was more responsible for his sense of isolation than his deafness:
The seclusion of Heiligenstadt was of itself so seductive to Beethoven, that the prudence of Dr.
Schmidt in advising him to withdraw so much from society, may be doubted; the more, because
the benefit to his hearing proved to be small or none. It gave him too many lonely hours in which
to brood over his calamity; it enabled him still to flatter himself that his secret was yet safe; it led
him to defer, too long for his peace of mind, the bitter moment of confession; and consequently to
35
deprive himself needlessly of the tender compassion and ready sympathy of friends.
It is certainly beyond the scope of this chapter to survey the arguments regarding
the private or public nature of the document, so I will limit it to the arguments of a few
individuals and focus on the elements of the document that complicate the issue. The
Heiligenstadt Testament is unusual in a number of ways. Within the context of
Beethoven’s other written documents, it is unusual in that it is copied out in a fine hand
with corrections (though it is still difficult to read), suggesting that Beethoven’s primary
audience may not have been himself. Also, as many scholars have described, it is a quasilegal document (a term that sums up the private/public ambiguity). The main controversy
in the document is the omission of Beethoven’s brother Johann’s name in several places.
For some unknown reason, Beethoven left blank spaces where he would have otherwise
written the name Johann (his brother Carl, on the other hand, is named). Beethoven
scholars have only been able to speculate on reasons for the omission; as of yet, the
issue’s relevance to the Testament’s construction of deafness, or its orientation towards a
34
35
Ibid., 115.
Thayer, The Life of Beethoven, 351.
29
private or public audience, remains impossible to establish, so I will leave it for a more
extended discussion of the Testament.36
What is more directly related to the question of the Testament’s private or public
intentions is the tone and literary references. In the Testament, Beethoven takes a high
rhetorical tone (e.g. “O ye men”). As Lockwood notes, the suicide references can be
associated with Goethe’s Werther, and there are other references to Masonic ritual.37 To
these references, one can perhaps add Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions as a possible
influence. The tone of Rousseau’s landmark Confessions is echoed in the Heiligenstadt
Testament, as seen from this famous passage at the very beginning of the Rousseau:
I alone. I know my heart, and am acquainted with mankind. I am not made like any one I have
seen; I dare believe I am not made like any one existing…I have exposed myself as I was,
contemptible and vile some times; at others, good, generous, and sublime. I have revealed my
heart as thou sawest it thyself. Eternal Being! assemble around me the numberless throng of my
fellow-mortals; let them listen to my Confessions, let them lament at my unworthiness, let them
38
blush at my misery.
Both the Confessions and the Testament are statements—or performances—of solitude,
of self-isolation, of a misanthropic character. Neither Beethoven nor Rousseau seeks to
confess their sins; rather, they wish to explain their misery to the masses. The fact that
both documents were meant to be published only after the author’s death seems to
challenge theories of coincidence as well.
Claus Casinius, in his monograph Beethoven, has emphasized the Heiligenstadt
Testament as more of a literary document, supporting his argument with the literary
36
Maynard Solomon, who was the first scholar to seriously raise the question as to why Beethoven would
omit his brother’s Nikolaus Johann’s name, suggests that the reason could be related to Beethoven’s
unwillingness to treat his brother as an independent person, or to his uncertainty of which name to use in a
legal document, or to the possibility that Beethoven could not bear to write Johann because it was his
father’s name. See Beethoven, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 155-157.
37
Lockwood, 120-121.
38
Rousseau, Confessions (London: J. Bew, 1783), 1-2.
30
references and high rhetorical tone.39 Lockwood disagrees, and casts his argument in
terms of the private/public question: “The rhetorical aspect [of the Heiligenstadt
Testament] is stressed by Claus Casinius…but Casinius goes too far in interpreting the
Testament as primarily ‘an example of Beethoven’s close relationship to literature,’ not
as a primarily personal statement.”40
It is undeniable that Beethoven’s Testament, whether it is rhetorical or more
personal, focuses on the theme of isolation. What it leaves ambiguous is what causes this
isolation. This question gets back to the earlier question, what might it have meant for
Beethoven to say “I am deaf”? Does this isolation stem from the pain of Beethoven’s
deafness, or from his self-imposed (or doctor-imposed) retreat from public life? Is there a
necessary relationship between these two?
It is important, when trying to answer these questions, to keep in mind the dual
nature of disability. Lockwood conflates deafness with the social reaction to deafness,
and thus fails to fully acknowledge the distinction between private and public. In his
discussion of the Testament, he quotes the following passage from the Testament:
“[W]hat a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the
distance and I heard nothing or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard
nothing.” Before quoting this passage, he introduces it with “But the torment of deafness
is unbearable.”41 In this case, it would be more accurate to say that for Beethoven, the
social humiliation of deafness, in the context of a culture that does not view deaf people
highly, is perhaps more unbearable than the loss of hearing. Lockwood goes on later to
39
Casinius, Beethoven, “Sehnsucht und Unruhe in der Musik”: Aspekt zu Leben und Werk (Munich, 1992),
155-164.
40
Lockwood, 504, n.15.
41
Ibid., 119.
31
repeat stock phrases of Beethoven literature such as “As a man, he found himself
imprisoned by deafness. As an artist, he broke free.”42 Such sentiments conceal the role
of culture as a means of social imprisonment through prejudice, ignorance, and
misunderstanding.
Other scholars have noted that Beethoven’s anxiety stems more from social
isolation than from the experience of losing his hearing. Ernest Newman, in his
controversial monograph The Unconscious Beethoven, observes that “It is significant that
in the documents he has left us bearing upon his deafness, what he bewails is not its
possible influence upon him as a composer but its frustration of all his impulses to realize
himself in outward action.”43 This observation is supported by the inarguable fact that
music was an area of his life in which his hearing loss seemed to be affect him less
significantly, as Beethoven described in a long letter written to his close friend, the
violinist Karl Amenda, just three days after he wrote his letter to Wegeler: “My affliction
causes me the least trouble in playing and composing, the most in association with
others.”44 As it has been much noted, the years when he seemed to have been at his most
depressed (the years surrounding the Heiligenstadt Testament) produced a great deal of
music, including the Third Symphony.
The view of deafness as an isolation of a social nature rather than an aural one is a
common perspective that differentiates deaf people’s views of deafness from hearing
people’s views. The different perspectives have even been encoded in sign language
since the nineteenth century, as deaf historian Douglas Baynton explains:
42
Ibid., 122.
Ernest Newman, The Unconscious Beethoven: An Essay in Musical Psychology (London: Victor
Gollancz Ltd., 1968), 20.
44
Thayer, 298.
43
32
Silence is experienced by the hearing as an absence of sound. For those who have never heard,
deafness is not an absence. To be deaf is not to not hear for most profoundly deaf people, but a
social relation—that is, a relation with other human beings, those called “hearing” and those called
“deaf.” What the deaf person sees in these other people is not the presence or absence of hearing,
not their soundfulness or their silence, but their mode of communication—they sign, or they move
their lips. That is why deaf people in the nineteenth century typically referred to themselves not as
deaf people but as "mutes.” That is why the sign still used today that is translated as “hearing
45
person” is made next to the mouth, not the ear, and literally means “speaking person.”
It is important to note that from the deaf community perspective, Beethoven would not
have been labeled deaf. He remained a speaking person throughout his life, and as
Baynton notes, as speaking person in the nineteenth century was in a significant way akin
to a hearing person.
In fact, from a certain angle is difficult to argue that Beethoven was a deaf person,
even from a hearing perspective. The accounts of Beethoven’s hearing loss by his
contemporaries by no means provide a clear picture of what he could or could not hear,
and they are often contradictory. Indeed, there were so many conflicting stories floating
around about Beethoven’s hearing loss during his lifetime that many people may have
thought his deafness was merely a rumor.46 He began using Conversation Books in 1818,
but there is certainly evidence that he could hear well enough for conversation after that
date. For example, one contemporary wrote in 1825 that Beethoven could hear if you
shouted loudly into his left ear, and in 1826, the year before his death, a Dr. Spiker, the
royal librarian to the King of Prussia, reported that Beethoven could understand someone
if he knew the person.47 Additionally, as George Thomas Ealy has suggested, Beethoven
45
Douglas Baynton, “’A Silent Exile on This Earth:’ The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the
Nineteenth Century,” in the Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis (New York, London:
Routledge, 2006), 39.
46
Knittel, 59.
47
Ibid., 59.
33
likely never went deaf, in a physical sense, because his hearing loss was both inconsistent
and was mediated to a significant degree by the hearing aid technologies of the day.48
In 1802, as he penned the Testament, Beethoven’s hearing loss was for Beethoven
as much a philosophical reality as it was a physical reality. In one of the most interesting
lines in the Testament, Beethoven writes “To be forced in my twenty-eighth year to
become a philosopher is no easy matter, and less so for an artist than for anyone else.”49
It is unclear what Beethoven means by this statement, but one wonders if he might be
referring to the prominent role that deafness had played in Enlightenment philosophies.
Beethoven is certainly not expressing empowerment, but rather resignation. Here,
Beethoven may be implying that in order to cope with his own deafness, his path will be
to rationalize it on the level of philosophy rather than deal with it on the level of
experience. Like most hearing people, especially in Germany, he may have believed that
his deafness would eventually move his experience into a space beyond language and
sound, where these things would become more theoretical than immediately present. He
may also be alluding to the feeling that his deafness would render him in some way less
human and more like a case study in the Enlightenment philosophical project of
rationalizing deafness.
Beethoven’s response to his own deafness was undoubtedly shaped by German
Enlightenment ideas about deafness, which were strongly influenced by Protestant
theology. The philosophical roots that led German thinkers to resist the kinds of more
open-minded thinking about deafness and sign language that was occurring in France run
48
George Thomas Ealy, “Of Ear Trumpets and a Resonance Plate: Early Hearing Aids and Beethoven’s
Hearing Perception,” 19th-Century Music 17/3 (Spring 1994), 262-273.
49
“Schon in meinem 28 Jahre gezwungen Philosoph zu warden, es ist nicht leicht, für den Künstler
schwere[r] als für irgend jemand.” Thayer, 353.
34
long and deep. Maynard Solomon briefly brings up the history of deafness in Germany in
his collection Beethoven Essays, if only to justify his psychoanalytic interpretation of
Beethoven’s deafness. But what he has to say is accurate and to the point:
The auditory mechanism “keeps us oriented in the world of conduct.” This aspect of the function
of hearing was long ago perceived by Protestant theologians: they avowed that the benevolent God
dwells within the heart, whereas the God of wrath enters through the “open,” “receptive” sense of
hearing. Luther, who (like Beethoven) suffered from a tormenting buzzing in the ears, observed:
50
“In the Church of God nothing is demanded but hearing.”
The emphasis that the Protestant churches placed on hearing the Word of God, and on
reciting the catechism, had an important impact on the philosophy of deaf education in
Germany. Deaf education throughout Europe began primarily as a religious mission to
save “languageless” people by teaching them how to receive and understand the Gospels.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theological differences in different regions
had much to do with how people thought about deafness.
In Germany, unlike in France, it was not enough for a deaf person to understand
the written words of the Gospel; the deaf person had to learn to speak and to hear, so far
as possible, the Word. This theological imperative undermined the value of sign language
in the German lands, and led to what would become known as the German method of
deaf education, or “oralism.” With oralist education, the deaf student was taught to read
and imitate the hearing person’s speech by a variety of means. Typically, the students
trained in lip reading and speaking through years of watching their teachers or feeling the
throats of their teachers as their teachers spoke. In France, what became known as the
French method was the “manualist” approach that encouraged the students to use their
hands and body to communicate in signs.
50
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 93.
35
In German Enlightenment musical aesthetics, similarly to Protestant theology,
hearing was conceived of as the sense most connected to morality and to the maintenance
of civilized society. Johann Georg Sulzer writes about music in these terms in his
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771-1774), and Beethoven is known to have
read this text, which was one of the most widely-known works on German Enlightenment
aesthetics.51 Music, argues Sulzer, can save the “savage,” and the figure who has this
power of redemption is the musician Orpheus. “The Greek tradition of Orpheus, which
says that, through music, he dragged the Greeks out of their savagery, is certainly not all
myth,” writes Sulzer, crafting his own musico-centric version of Orpheus. “What other
means could one use to bring savage people to some degree of attention and to
sentiment?”52 (In Sulzer’s interpretation of Orpheus, we can recognize a predecessor of
Wagner’s 1870 image of Beethoven as the redeemer of the German nation, which I will
discuss in Chapter 2.)
Sulzer’s conception of hearing as the gateway to a higher morality essentially
excludes the deaf person from the higher society that is made accessible by first and
foremost music. Only hearing “can make heightened impressions on our heart,” he
writes, and continues that with music, “here begins the realm of the fine arts.”53 This
privileging of hearing the highest social and aesthetic force directly challenges the notion,
advocated by French thinkers including Denis Diderot and Rousseau, that mimesis, or
51
Matthew Riley,Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 63.
52
“Es ist geweiß nicht alles Fabel, was die griechische Tradition von Orpheus sagt, der die Griechen durch
Musik aus ihrer Wildheit soll gerissen haben. Was für ein ander Mittel könnte man brauchen, ein wildes
Volk zu einiger Aufmerksamkeit, und zut Empfindung zu bringen.” Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine
Theorie der Schönen Künste (Leipzig: M.G. Weidemann, 1771-1774), 2:789. Quoted and translated in
Riley, Musical Listening, 77.
53
Sulzer, 2:689. In Riley, 76.
36
gesture, had the power to reinstate societal equality. 54 The power of gesture was its
potential to act as a universal form of communication. Diderot’s famous experiment
illustrates this idea. In his Lettre sur les sourds et muets [A Letter on the Deaf and Mute],
Diderot describes attending a performance and plugging his ears in order to better
perceive the mimetic contents of the performers’s movements.55
For both German and French thinkers, deaf people without education represented
something like a savage. For the French, the dominant philosophy was that society could
teach, but also could learn from deaf people. In the German lands, the dominant position
towards deaf people was only to teach them to become more like hearing people. Given
the widespread German Enlightenment belief that hearing was an elevated sense meant
that attitudes towards deaf education were mildly fatalistic; the deaf person could only
aspire towards becoming a functional member of society as far as he or she could imitate
hearing people, and since deaf education could not restore hearing, the deaf person’s
access to the higher arts was thus restricted.
As the eighteenth century led into the nineteenth, an additional factor in causing
Germans to favor “oralism” over “manualism” began to emerge: nationalism. Slowly
over time, the deaf person transitioned from one type of marginalization to another.
During the early days of deaf education, hearing people viewed deaf people through a
religious lens, and considered them outsiders most importantly to the spiritual
community. With the rise of nationalism, deaf people became marginalized as outside the
national community. This new type of marginalization gave many deaf people the
54
John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 64.
55
Denis Diderot, “A Letter on the Deaf and Mute,” in Diderot’s Thoughts on Art and Style with some of his
Shorter Essays, edited and translated by Beatrix L. Tollemache (London: Rivingtons, 1904), 153.
37
paradoxical distinction of being native-born foreigners. Increasingly over the course of
the nineteenth century, deaf people would be seen more and more as an immigrant
population that did not speak the national language. This type of marginalization was
particularly true in the German-speaking lands, as Siegmund Prillwitz explains:
the reason for this rigid perseverance [of oralist education] solely in spoken German may have
been the political development of a nation which was primarily focusing on the common
language…The ideal of uniformity, of the majority standard, the patronizing dominance of the
strong of ‘persons in need of protection’ may have contributed to a situation where the
institutional side showed less and less understanding for the deaf and their independent linguistic
56
community.
The idea of a community and common language fundamental to nationalist movements
had much to do with the marginalization of deaf communities that had been fostered
throughout Europe during the Enlightenment. Douglas Baynton has written extensively
about how the process occurred in the United States, where it happened beginning around
the 1860s.57 In Germany, the nationalist process happened much earlier, coinciding with
an exclusionary attitude towards deaf people.
In late-eighteenth century France, the deaf education classes given by the Abbé de
l’Epée fascinated thousands of people who came from all over Europe to see sign
language in action and the spectacle of what they considered thoughtless savages prove
their ability to achieve rationality. The classes given by the Abbé de l’Epée were both
open to the public and free to any students.58 These two aspects set him apart from
56
Siegmund Prillwitz, “The Long Road Towards Bilingualism of the Deaf in the German-speaking Area,”
in Sign Language Research and Application: Proceedings of the International Congress, Hamburg, March
23-25, 1990, edited by Siegmund Prillwitz and Tomas Vollhaber (Hamburg: Signum Press, 1990), 14.
57
Baynton, 33-48.
58
The Abbé’s ability to be open and to allow any student to study with him was made possible by the fact
that he was independently wealthy. Other deaf educators had to struggle, since there was very little
promise of income. Most had to take on students of wealthier parents, unlike the Abbé, who created a great
deal of public good will by taking on poor students. His openness to students of all economic strata became
especially important during the Revolution, when it saved the Abbé Sicard, the Abbé de l’Épée’s successor,
from the guillotine. Sicard able to preserve his head partly because he could argue that the school served all
the people of France, and especially the poor..
38
virtually every other deaf educator in Europe, because until state-funded schools began to
open up, deaf educators were very secretive about their methods and did not permit many
pupils or much interaction between the schools and the public. As a result, the Abbé de
l’Epée’s methods had greater impact in the spread of deaf education throughout Europe,
at least initially.
The first state-funded school for the deaf opened in Paris in 1769 under the
direction of the Abbé. Nine years later, the Abbé’s chief rival, Samuel Heinicke, opened
up the second state-funded school for the deaf in Europe, in Leipzig.59 In 1779, not long
after Joseph II anonymously visited one of the Abbé de l’Épée’s classes and was much
impressed, the third state-funded school for the deaf opened up in Vienna, the
Taubstummeninstitut. The school was sponsored by Empress Maria Theresa herself and
run by a disciple of the Abbé.60 In short order, “daughter institutions of the Viennese
Institute were founded all over the Austro-Hungarian empire, including schools in Prague
and Milan.”61
Beethoven would have been aware of the school, given the important role it
played in Emperor Joseph II’s series of Enlightened Reforms. Many deaf people came to
Vienna during the nineteenth century as it grew into the most important center for deaf
culture in Austria.62 The school advocated a mixture of French and German educational
practices, teaching sign language in conjunction with the oral method. This approach was
used at the Vienna school until 1867, when the mixed method was discontinued in favor
59
Heinicke had engaged the Abbé in a print debate over the merits of manualist vs. oralist education. See
Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London:
Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), 162-165.
60
Ibid., 161-162.
61
Franz Dotte and Ingebord Okorn, “Austria’s Hidden Conflict: Hearing Culture Versus Deaf Culture,” in
Many Ways to be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities, eds. L. Monaghan, C. Schmaling, K.
Nakamura, and G. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2003), 49.
62
Ibid., 50.
39
of the German oralist method, which became mandatory in all deaf education centers in
Europe and America in 1880.
Beethoven would also most likely have been somewhat aware of the role that deaf
people were playing during the Revolution. Sophia Rosenfeld has recently shown that to
an astonishing degree, “the education of deaf people and the role of sign language in that
process were incorporated into revolutionary rhetoric and revolutionary public life.”63
There are many examples of this; take for instance, the year 1793, when the Abbé
Grégoire gave a famous speech amidst the Reign of Terror regarding the need for a single
national language. In the middle of the speech, he “drew his audience’s attention to the
deaf pupils of de l’Épée and Sicard [de l’Épée’s successor]. The deaf people alone, he
claimed, had learned to think ‘following the path of nature’ as a result of their reliance on
signs.”64 Given the significant presence of the deaf communities in Europe, especially in
Paris during the French Revolution, and Beethoven’s keen interest in both the Revolution
and in the Enlightened reforms that resulted in Vienna’s Taubstummeninstitut, it seems
possible that further research into Beethoven’s writings and activities with an awareness
of key figures, places and events in the European deaf communities could reveal further
connections between them and Beethoven.65
63
Sophia Rosenfeld, “The Political Uses of Sign Language,” Sign Language Studies 6/1 (Fall 2005), 19.
Ibid. 19.
65
One such possible connection between the deaf community and Beethoven is through Jean-Nicholas
Bouilly, the author of the 1798 libretto Léonore, ou l’amour conjugal, which formed the basis of the
libretto to Fidelio (original version, 1805). Bouilly was also the author of the play Abbé de l’Épée (1799),
which portrayed a famous incident from the by-then mythologized Abbé (who had died in 1789). This play
was phenomenally popular in France, despite unfavorable critical reviews, and played more shows in Paris
than any other play in this period except for Beaumarchais’s Figaro. Until further research can be done, it
is not known whether or not Beethoven knew the play, although given its enormous popularity, it is
certainly not impossible. The play was a dramatization of a famous incident in which de l’Épée had taken
in a deaf-mute boy who had been abandoned and, after communicating with the boy in sign language, had
argued successfully in court that the boy was actually a member of the aristocracy and was entitled to a
large estate. Bouilly himself was an active advocate for the deaf community in France. Nicholas Mirzoeff,
64
40
Though it is impossible to generate an adequately thorough survey of cultural
attitudes towards deaf people during the time when Beethoven’s deafness was beginning
to appear, it is important to begin to look at ways in which Beethoven’s public identity as
a deaf person may have been shaped. The private experience fosters a richness of
description, and has inspired countless interpretations, in part because it resists the
theoretical frameworks of the music community, which abide by the Disability model of
deafness and construct hearing as normal. The public narrative of disability is almost
always shaped by forces outside the control of the individual who experiences the
disability itself. Hence, in Beethoven’s case, he could only refer to this narrative with the
monadic description “deaf” because he knew that he had a limited degree of agency in its
construction. But musicologists have a role to play by looking at this history and trying to
understand how it affected Beethoven. The myth of Beethoven, without a critical view of
the history of deafness, will continue to offer us only a limited understanding of
Beethoven’s experience of deafness in its dual sense.
“Visualizing” Beethoven’s deafness
In the preceding section, I have tried to complicate and historicize the public
image of deafness to which Beethoven may have been referring to with the words “I am
deaf.” A clearer idea of deaf history is important because it provides a means to bring
perspective to the vast literature that has focused on the private experience of deafness in
Beethoven’s life. This literature ranges from biographical studies to medical
pathographies to poetry and plays. The majority of this literature has ignored any
discussion of deaf history or disability theory; ultimately, it is characterized by endlessly
Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995), 74.
41
repeated attempts to capture Beethoven’s most personal experience in language. It is
possible that the driving force behind these attempts is two-fold: part fascination from a
hearing-dominant culture with a deaf composer, and part anxiety, which motivates a
repeated reinscription of Beethoven’s deafness as marginal in order to shore up the lines
between hearing/deaf people that a deaf composer inherently deconstructs.
Regarding the private/public nature of deafness, there is no equivalent binary in
Beethoven studies; the closest candidate would have to be “the man and the music.” In
practice, this man/music binary serves to continually reinscribe the division of body and
mind, making it fundamentally in opposition to the function of modern disability studies,
which challenges traditional notions of the body/mind divide. Beethoven the man, so
often represented simply as a disabled body, is repeatedly forced into a narrative that
emphasizes certain values, particularly those relating to heroic or Promethean tropes. In
fact, the narrative is so powerful that it threatens to, and often does, overwhelm
Beethoven the man, as K. M. Knittel explains: “the critics’ [have a] fear of not simply
musical, but also ‘biographical’ failure: that Beethoven will fall short of the role into
which we have cast him, failing to become the hero of his own life.“ She goes on to argue
that “the Beethoven myth forces us to explore the same issue over and over…to what
purpose? and for whose gain?”66
Beethoven is one of the most “texted” cultural figures in European history, in the
sense of the vast literature that has grown around his music and biography. This
literature—written words, musical analyses, images—has grown so vast that many
scholars state plainly that it blocks out the real Beethoven. Essentially, Beethoven
66
K. M. Knittel, “‘Late’, Last, and Least: On Being Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major, Op. 135.” Music &
Letters 87/1 (January 2006), 17.
42
scholarship has become a hall of mirrors, a series of endless visual reflections of partial
aspects of the man and myth, in which the true figure of Beethoven has been lost (as
William Newman, Scott Burnham, and others have stated).67
It is important to recognize that all of the ink that has been spilled on Beethoven’s
myth, particularly as it relates to deafness, is directly related to the ongoing visual
construction of deafness, a process that began in the middle of the eighteenth century. In
France, where the social category of deaf person emerged first and most prominently, a
responding impulse emerged to visually categorize and separate deaf people. This
impulse, as mentioned earlier, was amplified in the case of deafness because unlike some
physical disabilities, deafness is not “written” on the body; in other words, it has no
visible physical signs.68 As categories of “normal” and “abnormal” began to shape
European society more and more during the nineteenth century, the lack of outward
physical signs of deafness bred anxiety in the “normal” population towards deaf people.
Over time, it became an unwritten cultural project to establish visible symptoms that
would mark and marginalize deaf people. Nicholas Marzoeff describes this process in
more detail:
It was during the Consulate and Empire that a radical and unprecedented shift in the understanding
of the deaf and their sign language took place, the consequences of which echoed down the
nineteenth century and have only very recently been challenged. This change was part of a wider
and longer evolution, described by Georges Canguilhem as “normalization”: “Between 1759, the
date of the first appearance of the word normal, and 1834, the date of the first appearance of the
word normalized, a normative class conquered the power to identify the function of social norms
with its own uses and its own determination of content.” This new taxonomy categorized hearing
as normal and deafness as pathological, dating from the Consulate and Empire. Perhaps the most
striking consequence of this recategorization was not so much that renewed antipathy to the deaf,
which has been recorded since Aristotle, but the visual construction of deafness. Visible causes
67
William S. Newman, “The Beethoven Mystique in Romantic Art, Literature, and Music,” The Musical
Quarterly 69/3 (Summer, 1983), 354-387; Scott Burnham, “The four ages of Beethoven: critical reception
and the canonic composer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000) 272-291.
68
Many deaf people, if they choose to, can act to render their deafness largely invisible within hearing
society. This is called “passing,” as in a deaf person can “pass” as a hearing person.
43
were sought for the new disease, and sign language was less of a philosophical problem than a
symptom. Anthropologists, artists, and physicians were all involved in creating this visual
69
taxonomy.
To this list, we can add music scholars. I would argue that we should understand many of
the attempts to visualize (or materialize) Beethoven’s deafness in various media such as
musical notation, literary works, or films the context of this larger process to visually
construct deafness.
In this final section of the paper, I will briefly survey some of the different means
that scholars have used to try to visualize, or materialize, deafness. In the interest of
space, I will restrict my examples to commentaries on the printed scores of Beethoven’s
music. In general, scholars who are arguing for a visualization of deafness in musical
notation take one of two sides: either they argue that Beethoven is passively representing
the limitations of his hearing in the music, or they argue that Beethoven is actively
representing his own deafness in the music.
By far the most common visualizations of deafness try to account for passages in
the music, particularly what analysts have deemed “abnormal” ones, by suggesting that
the score presents a record of Beethoven’s hearing limitations. (This process begins in the
nineteenth century and has carried through to the twentieth century. One example, of
many that could be cited from nineteenth-century critics and analysts, is that of
Beethoven’s final string quartet (F major, Op. 135). In the second movement, the middle
section contains no less than forty-seven repetitions of the same motive, as seen in the
lower strings in Figure 1. In the context of a relatively short movement, and a relatively
straightforward piece, the passage is striking. For A. B. Marx, it was striking enough to
incite him to wonder “has this tone-picture burrowed its way into [Beethoven’s] spirit
69
Mirzoeff, 65.
44
with its buzzing, perhaps from the diseased auditory nerves?”72 The idea of Beethoven’s
buzzing ears comes from the June 29, 1801, letter when Beethoven first wrote that “my
ears whistle and buzz [Sausen und Brausen] continually, day and night.”73
Figure 1. String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. 2, mm. 134-164
There are many more examples of scholars, from the nineteenth century to the
present, who claim to have found ‘evidence’ of Beethoven’s limited hearing capabilities
in the music; one recent scholar to do so is Robert Fink. Here again, as Marx did, Fink
72
Adolph Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leben und Schaffen, 2 vols. In 1 (Berlin: Janke, 1859),
2:312-14. Qtd. in K. M. Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 51/1 (Spring 1998), 52.
73
Thayer, 300.
45
uses deafness to explain, or as he puts it excuse, an unusual passage in the music. Amidst
his discussion of the last bars of the Maestoso in the Ninth Symphony, he writes
the level of orchestral violence needed to maintain the celebration of brotherhood cannot easily be
glossed over. Aside from the constant assault of brass and percussion, the massed woodwinds are
topped by a truly egregious piccolo part. This stratospheric obbligato is only playable at an
unremitting fortissimo. When attempted by two early nineteenth-century piccolos at the extreme
limit of their compass it cuts right through the texture, just on the border between a succession of
musical pitches and an out-of-tune shriek. One might excuse Beethoven on purely physiological
grounds: it seems likely that by 1825 this high-pitched whistle was the only musical sound that
74
had any chance of surmounting his hearing loss.
The second, and less common type of visualization, is one where the scholaranalyst suggests that Beethoven intentionally represents symptoms of deafness in the
music. Owen Jander is certainly the scholar most associated with this type of
programmatic visualization. His interpretation of the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony
provides us with an excellent example: Jander argues that Beethoven represents three
different symptoms of deafness in the music score. These three symptoms, for which we
have Beethoven’s description in the letters are “The Buzzing and Rumbling in
Beethoven’s Ear,” “Sounds That Should be Audible Have Now Become Difficult to
Hear,” and “High Pitches No Longer Audible.”
In Figure 2, beginning in the last bar of the first system, Beethoven scores a
combination of pianissimo pizzicato strings and what Jander calls a “peculiar arpeggiated
arco figure that rustles constantly throughout this pizzicato texture.” For Jander, this
“persistent background noise, with its weird combination of pizzicato and arco, is, I
74
Robert Fink, “Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Failure, or Listening to the
Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime,” in Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of
Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 141.
46
submit, a musical reflection of Beethoven’s remark, ‘my ears buzz and rumble
incessantly, day and night.”75
The second symptom, sounds becoming difficult to hear, is reflected for Jander in
the score by the fact that “throughout the whole of this transformed Allegro…every
passage that had originally been forte is now pianissimo [at mm. 255-262]” Jander
additionally supports his case by pointing to Beethoven’s musical borrowing of the main
theme of Mozart’s G minor Symphony. Beethoven had the Mozart theme copied out in
his sketchbooks for the Fifth Symphony, so we know that he was definitely thinking of
this theme when he wrote the obviously-derived opening theme of the scherzo. Jander
speculates that Beethoven’s use of this theme, which had been scored much more lightly
in Mozart’s work, knowingly sets it in pianissimo pizzicato strings in order to illustrate a
sound that once was clear but has since become difficult to hear. The third symptom, high
pitches no longer audible, is depicted in Jander’s scenario by a series of wind entrances
that break off one-by-one, leaving even-lower instruments until the music arrives at the
pianississimo low A-flat in m. 324 (see Figure 3).
75
Owen Jander, “Self-Portraiture and the Third Movement of the C-Minor Symphony,” Beethoven Forum
(2000), 25-70.
47
Figure 2. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 243-267
48
Figure 3. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 316-344
49
Lewis Lockwood suggests another example of composer-intended visualization of
deafness, and like the Marx example it is found in the Op. 135 quartet. At issue is the
mysterious musically-set text, Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß.“Muss es sein? Es muss
sein! Es muss sein!” [The resolution reached with difficulty. Must it be? It must be! It
must be!] (see Figure 4) While a majority of scholars have suggested that the text refers
to the tragic situation with Beethoven’s nephew, given that it would have been pressing
on Beethoven’s mind at the time he wrote the quartet, Lockwood brings the enigmatic
text back to a possible association with Beethoven’s own words about his deafness. The
Figure 4. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 1-6
“runic sayings” in Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1811-1818, for Lockwood, show a similar
tone and terseness; some of these entries include phrases such as “Learn to keep silent, oh
friend,” or “Live only in your art, for you are limited in your senses; this is nevertheless
the only existence for you.”76 The similarities between these pithy mottos and the text of
the Op. 135 quartet suggest to Lockwood that we should take the quartet text seriously
rather than understand it as intentionally unsolvable or humorous. What is more, the text
76
Lockwood, 483.
50
“Es muss sein!” in this case would refer to Beethoven’s resignation to overcome the
difficulty of deafness.
The depiction of buzzing and rumbling, given that it makes a very vivid
impression in the letters, is a common trope in musical and literary visualizations of
Beethoven’s deafness. To my ear, a key passage later in the quartet, as seen in Figure 5,
is a much more compelling musical candidate for an illustration of buzzing and rumbling
than those suggested by Jander or Marx. However, it still remains unconvincing because
these examples do not seek to understand deafness; they merely seek to recreate it in
terms that resonate with fantasies of deafness that render these musical objects into
symbols of disability.
Figure 5. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 171-176
Conclusions One must ask, why have Beethoven scholars, and musicologists in general, not
yet dealt more comprehensively with the history of deafness? This question is particularly
pressing given that deafness has had such a presence in musical thought since the
eighteenth century. For Beethoven scholars, three strategies for dealing with deafness
tend to occur again and again. Either scholars ignore deafness and focus only on the
musical material, or they discuss deafness but in terms that reflect only a disability model
51
of deafness, or they try to ascertain what Beethoven could or could not hear. This last
strategy is emphasized particularly in the medical biographies, or the “pathographies.” I
would argue that there are a number of reasons why the social history of deafness has not
yet been more than a cursory subject of curiosity for musicology.
First, and most simply, deaf history has not been an area of wide academic study
for very long. Deaf studies only began to emerge after 1960, a landmark year in Deaf
history.77 In that year, a young linguist named William Stokoe published a paper that
argued that what is now called American Sign Language was a fully functional language
in its own right. Stokoe, a hearing man, was teaching at Gallaudet University at a time
when sign languages were considered by both the hearing and Deaf communities as
inferior to spoken language. The effect of Stokoe’s work, which soon included a
landmark dictionary of American Sign Language, was to create a sense of validation
about deaf people’s first language. This directly inspired the emergence of a Deaf
community that supported research into the history of deafness. The field of disability
studies also owes much to this revival of deaf history.78
Second, the work that has been done on deaf history has been overwhelmingly
focused on deaf history in France and in America. Any work on the history of disability
is already challenging because so often disability goes unrecorded; this problem is
particularly true in Germany and Austria, where deafness remains far more marginalized
than in other countries, as discussed above. Any work on deafness in Germany and
Austria during Beethoven’s time will remain particularly elusive until the German Deaf
community becomes as organized as the American.
77
78
For more information on this moment in Deaf history, see my introduction.
See Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.
52
Third, I believe that the study of deafness as a legitimate historical subject, where
deaf people are understood as part of a community with a public identity, is an area that is
presents at least some discomfort and puzzlement for the musical community as a whole.
To render deafness as a public identity more visible, and understandable, is perhaps in
some sense threatening to a community that defines itself largely by hearing and
conceives of music itself as aural experience. The music community enforces the idea of
hearing as normal in part through particular methods of musical training that focus on the
ear, and on almost exclusively aural communication as the only way to define music. If
deafness as a historical subject is kept out of sight, so to speak, then it remains less
threatening. But a study of deaf people as a linguistic and cultural community rather than
an individual pathology goes against the grain of a hearing-dominant culture, and no
group has a greater stake in the perpetuation of a hearing-dominant culture, it can be
argued, that the musical community.
53
Chapter 2: Richard Wagner’s Beethoven centenary essay and
the social construction of “normalcy” in the nineteenth century
No document has defined Beethoven’s deafness more explicitly, and elaborately,
as a private experience than Richard Wagner’s 1870 Beethoven centenary essay. In this
famous essay, Wagner argues that the private experience of deafness for Beethoven is not
a defect but a personal and musical advantage. In what is now a familiar narrative
element of the Beethoven myth, Wagner redefines deafness as the key that allows
Beethoven to fully experience a “pure” inner world by removing his connection with the
fallen, contaminated modern world. This private, inward-directed experience becomes
elevated to a new level through Wagner’s use of both Schopenhauerean philosophy and
nationalist rhetoric. In Schopenhauerean terms, as adapted by Wagner, the “inner life” is
that “through which we are directly allied with the whole of Nature, and thus are brought
into a relation with the Essence of things.”79 In Wagner’s nationalist terms, the inner life
is the essence of the German spirit, and Beethoven is the greatest heroic example of this
inward-directedness:
[Beethoven’s] rebellion consisted in nothing but the exuberant unfolding of his inner
genius…Here is shewn once more the idiosyncrasy of German nature, that profoundly inward gift
which stamps its mark on every form by moulding it afresh from within, and thus is saved from
80
the necessity of outward overthrow.
Wagner describes Beethoven’s deafness using the term “total deafness;” in the
essay, this term encapsulates the idea that deafness gave Beethoven “total access” to both
Schopenhauer’s Essence of things and the power of the German spirit. Thus, in Wagner’s
79
Richard Wagner, Beethoven (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1870); translated by William Ashton Ellis in Richard
Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1896; reprint, New York: Broude
Brothers, 1966), 5:59-126, at 68.
80
Ibid., 84-85.
54
argument, deafness as a purely private, and depriving, experience becomes something
both metaphysical and nationalistic. It also becomes the source of Beethoven’s genius.
The Beethoven centenary essay has had an enormous impact on reception of
Beethoven’s deafness ever since its publication, as K.M. Knittel has shown. As I
discussed in Chapter 1, critics in the middle of the nineteenth century often attributed the
unusual or rule-breaking “defects” of the late works to the negative effects of
Beethoven’s deafness. In the centenary essay, explains Knittel, “Wagner made a radical
and unprecedented departure from the perspective of these early critics: he proposed for
the first time that Beethoven’s late works were in fact his greatest and that his loss of
hearing was beneficial, even vital, to the creative process.”81 Most importantly, in
Wagner’s “reinterpretation” of deafness, through the conflation of genius and disability,
Beethoven becomes identified by his deafness, a construct still upheld today through the
popular description of him as a “deaf composer.”
Much has been written about this essay; while deafness is in many ways at the
center of its aesthetic and nationalist arguments, the essay contains a great deal more to
discuss. Given the rhetorical moment, Wagner sets out to do two sizable tasks; at once to
make a “contribution to the Philosophy of Music” and to mark the German unification by
connecting Beethoven to his definition of the German Spirit. The centenary essay
represents the culmination of Wagner’s engagement with Schopenhauer, whose work
Wagner had discovered in 1854. Wagner’s prose works have been discussed in terms of
pre- and post-centenary essay, because in it more than in any other work of his career
Wagner explicitly quotes Schopenhauer and embraces an aesthetic of music as a language
81
K. M. Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 51, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), 51.
55
above words.82 For this reason, it has been called “the major aesthetic work of Wagner’s
later years.”83
The essay’s form is notable as well, since it was written for an auspicious
occasion—1870 was both the centenary of Beethoven’s birth and the year before German
unification. The dual nature of this occasion is the reason that Wagner combines the
discussions of Schopenhauer and German nationalism in the essay. The essay’s readers
are asked to imagine that Wagner has been “called to deliver a speech at an ideal feast in
honour of the great musician [Beethoven],” but since the speech “was not to be delivered
in reality, he might give it the advantage of a greater compass than would have been
permissible in the case of an address to an actual audience.” 84 In fact, with this conceit—
that a public oration has been subsumed into an essay for private consumption—the essay
on the formal level emphasizes the superiority of the private experience over a public
one. It also calls elevates imagined sound over heard sound.
The Beethoven centenary essay is a remarkable document within Wagner’s
career; it represents for Wagner an important moment of reckoning with two of the most
influential figures in his life, Beethoven and Schopenhauer. It is also a key document in
the reception history of Beethoven’s deafness, but not necessarily in the ways that Knittel
suggests. Knittel proposes that Wagner’s essay presents a “radical reinterpretation” of
deafness, but this is only true from a perspective that defines deafness as a disability
according to the norms of the hearing community. Wagner’s romanticization of deafness
82
Thomas Grey, Wagner’s musical prose: Texts and contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 3-6
83
Jürgen Kühnel, “The Prose Writings,” in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski,
trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 619.
84
Richard Wagner, Beethoven (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1870); translated by William Ashton Ellis in Richard
Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1896; reprint, New York: Broude
Brothers, 1966), 5:59-126, at 59.
56
as the producer of an extraordinary ability is a different narrative, but one that still
marginalizes deafness within the “normal” community. It exaggerates the biased
construction of deafness as a private, individual, pathological experience that has
characterized the hearing perspective on deafness for centuries. It also reinscribes the
connection between pathology and genius that is so omnipresent in the arts in the
nineteenth century. By rendering deafness pathological, and “divinely” pathological,
Wagner links Beethoven’s genius/supernatural ability with his disability.85
If we read the essay within the context of the history of deafness and disability
more broadly, we can begin to understand that Wagner’s argument is actually rather
unremarkable, that it simply follows the nineteenth-century movements towards
conflating disability and identity, and in Beethoven’s case, disability and genius. As I will
show, an understanding of deaf history can help to answer three questions that have
puzzled musicologists about the Beethoven centenary essay.
The first question is: what motivated Wagner to present his take on deafness?
Unsurprisingly, music scholars have ignored cultural shifts in the understanding of
deafness and have focused their speculations on Wagner’s personal feelings and motives.
Knittel and Carolyn Abbate have both offered particularly detailed yet speculative
reasons why Wagner would construct deafness in this way. Both are correct that the essay
has perpetuated a certain construction of deafness, but it is not specifically Wagner’s
construction. The nineteenth-century understanding of deafness certainly had some effect
85
In 1982, Norman Geschwind published a paper on his work with dyslexics in which he coined the term
“pathology of superiority,” which referred to his finding that “anomalies” in the brain also determine
characteristics that he described as “superior.” See “Why Orton Was Right,” Annals of Dyslexia 32 (1982),
23. This medical finding echoes in some ways the pathologizing of genius.
57
on Wagner’s shaping of his image of the deaf Beethoven, and an awareness of deaf
history can help to show where the connections occur.
The second and third questions about the Beethoven centenary essay have arisen
because Wagner’s departure from the early critics’ understanding of deafness as
imperfect hearing was very short-lived. Only three years later, Wagner abandoned his
reading of Beethoven’s deafness and reverted to the negative position of the early critics.
In his 1873 essay on the interpretation of the Ninth Symphony, Wagner wrote
Unmistakably, with the advent of Beethoven’s deafness, the aural image of the orchestra [had] so
far faded from his mind that he lost that distinct consciousness of its dynamic values which was so
indispensable, when his conceptions themselves required constant innovation in orchestral
86
treatment.
Why did Wagner change his interpretation of deafness? And why did the particular
interpretation of deafness that he created in the Beethoven essay have such a lasting
impact on the musical community, despite his own abandonment of it? Deaf history can
help to answer all of these questions.
In the following sections, I will address these questions, and I will also show how
Wagner plays by the rules of the hearing community by contributing to the continual
process of visually constructing deafness. Most importantly, in the essay Wagner gives to
Beethoven’s deafness both a temporal shape—the idea of a gradually declining hearing
towards total deafness that corresponds proportionally to a gradually increasing contact
with genius towards Nature-inspired genius—and a pictorial landscape that describes
Beethoven’s private experience of deafness: the famous program to the C# minor string
quartet, Op. 131. With these key visualizations of deafness, Wagner’s essay reinscribes
86
Richard Wagner, "Zum Vortrage der neunten Symphonie Beethoven's," translated as "The Rendering of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in Richard Wagner's Prose Works 5:229-53, at 234.
58
the same kind of visual construction that began with the emergence of deafness as a
social category in the late eighteenth century and continues to this day (see Chapter 1).
Hearing perspectives Within the framework that I have already discussed—where the musical
community relies on the cultural acceptance of hearing as the human norm and constantly
acts to enforce this norm—Wagner’s view presents a problem. To argue that deafness
actually allows one to become a better musician is to undermine the idea that music is
only for the hearing. Left alone, this notion remains threatening to a hearing community’s
conception of music, but it should come as no surprise that Wagner and music scholars
who have commented on this essay all try to explain away the idea that a relationship
between a deaf person and music could be construed as normal.
For Wagner, metaphysics mediate this problem. The essay argues that deafness
could act as anything but a disability only in the rarest of circumstances, and more
importantly, these circumstances fall outside the normal bounds of human experience. In
Wagner’s conception, deafness is acceptable in a musician only because it transports the
musician beyond the real world into a metaphysical realm. Overall, the essay reads like a
series of disclaimers, almost like it presents the idea that “deafness worked wonders for
Beethoven,” then cautions the reader, “but don’t try this at home because Beethoven is
not like you or me.” Wagner’s most forced use of metaphysics to justify separating
Beethoven from the crowd is the passage where he observes that Beethoven’s skull “was
of quite unusual density and thickness,” and uses this fact to conclude that “Nature
shielded a brain of exceeding tenderness, that it might solely look within, and chronicle
59
the visions of a lofty heart in quiet undisturbed.”87 Throughout the essay, Wagner
presents a veritable catalogue of tropes that set Beethoven apart: his “savage
independence,” his animal-like qualities and boorishness, his distinct physiognomy, his
lack of reason, and so on. With metaphysical arguments and a stockpile of stereotypes,
Wagner reminds us constantly that Beethoven is different and undermines the fact that
Beethoven challenges hearing as a pre-requisite for music-making.
K. M. Knittel explains Wagner’s treatment of deafness by suggesting that
“Wagner’s romanticization of deafness is perhaps best understood as nostalgia for a lost
time.”88 The lost time, she suggests, to which deafness provides an escape, is one that
existed before the noise-filled industrial soundscape. To contextualize this narrative of
deafness and pre-industrialization, she discusses the discourses on noise and distraction in
Wagner’s writings as well as in those of Schopenhauer, Luigi Russolo, and others.89
“Most important,” writes Knittel,
is the coincidence of Wagner’s new image of Beethoven with the height of German
industrialization—with its attendant proliferation of factories, construction of railways, and
expansion of urban centers—which generated new levels of noise that competed with music and
even ideas. Perhaps deafness suggested to Wagner (whose lifetime spans this era) a return to an
90
earlier, quieter time, an enviable refuge from progress and the noise that came with it.
At the very end of her essay, Knittel also suggests that Wagner may have been motivated
by an even more personal interpretation of deafness, noting that
in 1870, Wagner was less troubled by life’s uproar than at any other time in his life. Living in
Switzerland, far from his enemies and the bustle of city life, united at last with Cosima and their
87
Ibid., 89.
Knittel, 81.
89
Ibid., 75-82. A particularly resonant example of this discourse, though from a much different time and
place, is found in Paul Bowles’s description of the noise-filled city: “One would never wish to be blind, yet
not a day passes in the city that one does not tickle one’s imagination with the idea that total deafness might
be a delight.” While the comment is not entirely serious, it does contain reversals of two typical hearing
assumptions about deafness: one, that deafness is essentially tragic, and two, that blindness is always
preferable to deafness. What makes it more unusual is that Bowles is a musician. Timothy Mangan and
Irene Herrmann, eds. Paul Bowles on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 107.
90
Knittel, 76.
88
60
children, he was as “deaf” to the troubles of the world as he could ever have hoped to be. Perhaps
it is not so remarkable that he would write nostalgiacally of deafness at precisely the moment in
91
his life when he had discovered “silence.”
In this concluding passage, Knittel speculates that Wagner’s image of deafness as
peaceful “silence” parallels his own experience. In both constructions of deafness, as
nostalgia for a lost time and as idealistic reflection of Wagner’s present circumstances,
deafness remains a figment of Wagner’s imagination. Although Knittel’s explanations
certainly are plausible, they leave out the cultural treatment of deaf people in the
nineteenth century as an active shaping force for Wagner’s treatment of deafness. To
suggest that Wagner was motivated by an envy of isolation is to imply that there was a
deaf experience of isolation worthy of envy. Whether or not a deaf person felt isolated in
the nineteenth century, or in the twentieth, is as much an issue of how the culture treated
deaf people as it is a result of any one person’s hearing impairment.
Similarly, Abbate explains Wagner’s motivations as purely personal, but where
Knittel sees idealizing nostalgia behind Wagner’s essay, Abbate sees something very
different: fear of deafness. In her reading, Beethoven’s fate “haunted Wagner, who, like
many others, preferred to heroicize this fate and wax lyrical over Beethoven’s
consignment to a silent world.” Immediately following this statement, Abbate describes a
passage from the essay in these terms:
Beethoven’s affliction is deemed enviable, yet the passage carries no conviction, and seems to
exist to stave off fear of deafness with its sound. With its sound: that is the point. In the Beethoven
essay, Wagner’s own prose style, with its accretion of adjectives and its length—with its musical
92
repetitions—becomes pure sound that must ward off the silence of deafness.
Abbate’s explanation reduces Wagner’s essay to a kind of buffer between hearing
and deafness, motivated by the fear of deafness. It is a difficult argument to disprove, like
91
92
Ibid., 81-82.
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 124.
61
all arguments that lay the burden of proof on a subjective state of mind. The piece that we
are missing here is, what kind of deafness was Wagner afraid of?
Abbate’s discussion of Wagner’s essay is embedded in her larger discussion of a
convention she calls “operatic deafness,” where opera characters are perceived as unable
to hear the music of their own opera, and are thus in a musical sense “deaf.” Throughout
her chapter in Unsung Voices, Abbate consistently defines deafness from an exclusively
hearing and musical perspective, thus missing an opportunity to provide a more nuanced
view of deafness in her otherwise provocative discussion.93 The only meaning of
deafness that plays a role in her argument is “deafness as anti-music:”
Deafness has the capacity to deny music. Deafness is also the place where one special
interpretation of musical voices can begin—paradoxically, of course, because deafness is the
deepest imaginable antithesis to music, the one thing that a deaf person can never possess, a form
of discourse unthinkable and unattainable. The deaf learn language, learn to read lips, but can
never experience music….For the deaf man, all voices are unsung, not in one sense of the word—
being praised or unrecognized—but in that they are undone, silenced, and deaf: deafness means
94
the end of music.
Significantly, Abbate views deafness as the single-most important fact of the
study of Beethoven, because it represents the opposite of music. “Deafness is an
unthinkable destiny for any musical individual, and thus Beethoven’s biography has been
dominated both openly and secretly by the single fact of his loss of hearing.”95 Later,
Abbate further renders deafness in musical terms in her discussion of Mahler: “Mahler
finally reconstrues his ‘deafness’ as the impossibility of locating meaning within
music.”96
93
In Richard Taruskin’s response to this chapter (cited in my introduction), his discussion of deafness is
similarly limited.
94
Abbate, 130-131.
95
Ibid., 124.
96
Ibid., 125.
62
Abbate’s deafness is also one that can be “warded off” by the “sound” of written
prose text. This is a somewhat odd argument to make, given that Wagner’s prose text is
itself silent. Abbate seems to be saying that language is itself musical in a way that
represents the opposite of deafness. This argument contains strong traces of the view that
the deaf person is shut out from the realm of language, where sign language is construed
as concrete and spoken language as abstract (and therefore more in tune with music). It
also neglects the fact that the essay’s form places it squarely in a realm that has been
considered the special domain of deaf people: the silent kingdom of the written word.97
In eighteenth-century France in particular, deaf people were seen as potentially more
masterful (with education) at visual media, including the fine arts and the written word,
for a variety of reasons. Wagner’s notion of the essay as a hybrid of an oration that has
been “expanded” into an essay for private consumption at least complicates the notion
that Wagner expanded it to ward off the terror of deafness, because in Wagner’s framing,
the work is transformed from something spoken to something silent.
Deaf history perspectives Remarkably, given the importance that has been ascribed to the Beethoven essay
for subsequent reception of Beethoven’s deafness, the word “deaf” appears in it only five
times. Even more significantly, three of these five appearances refer specifically to “total
deafness.” Total deafness is important to understanding the ways in which Wagner
engages the public constructions of deafness. It is of course a fiction in of itself— its
synonym, “silence,” is a concept with essentially no meaning. Total deafness is less a
description of someone’s hearing and more a metaphor for “the opposite of hearing.”
97
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London, New York: Verso,
1995), 50-72.
63
With Beethoven, as I have already discussed, “total deafness,” even in today’s
“profoundly deaf” sense, was likely never a description of his hearing experience because
of his use of hearing aids, the non-linear progression of his hearing, and the fact that his
hearing loss was greater in one ear than the other. Still, it is not uncommon to see in
modern program notes statements like “by now, Beethoven was totally deaf.” We should
look at any description of ‘total deafness” as a manipulation of the image of deafness, an
exaggeration that ultimately supports the Disability model of deafness.
Wagner’s use of “total deafness” was unremarkable in the context of nineteenthcentury discourse. Silence, as Deaf historian Douglas Baynton explains, was a common
descriptor of deaf people and deafness by both the hearing and deaf communities in the
nineteenth century, despite the fact that it is such a problematic term:
The use of “silent” and “silence”…was (and is) a common description of the world of deafness,
and at first glance would seem a common sense description as well. Deaf people use it as well as
hearing people. In the nineteenth century, for example, journals by and for the deaf had such titles
as the Silent Worker and Silent World. Today there are newspapers such as the Silent News, and
clubs with such names as the Chicago Silent Dramatic Club. “Silence” is not a straightforward or
unproblematic description of the experience of a deaf person, however. First, few deaf people hear
nothing. Most have hearing losses which are not uniform across the entire range of pitch-they will
hear low sounds better than high ones, or vice versa. Sounds will often be quite distorted, but
heard nevertheless. And second, for those who do not hear, what does the word silence signify?
Unless they once heard and became deaf, the word is meaningless as a description of their
experience. (Even for those who once heard, as the experience of sound recedes further into the
98
past, so too does the significance of silence diminish.)
Baynton here describes the American deaf community’s appropriation of “silence” as a
self-referential term. A similar usage among both the deaf and hearing communities was
also widespread in Europe. The word “silence” as an imagined state of deafness dates
back to ancient times and derives in part from the idea that deaf people live in a world
empty of language. In hearing publications, “silence” was used regularly to refer to
98
Douglas Baynton, “‘A Silent Exile on This Earth:’ The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the
Nineteenth Century,” in the Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis (New York, London:
Routledge, 2006), 38-39.
64
deafness. One of the first deaf publications to use it was the first American journal
dedicated to the deaf, the American Annals of the Deaf. This publication began printing in
1847, and is still in print, making it the oldest English-language journal dealing with
deafness. In Germany, the first deaf newspaper, Der Taubstummenfreunde [The DeafMute’s Friend] began publication significantly later, in 1872 (in the second year of
German unification). Other deaf newspapers that followed were Die Stimme [The Voice]
and Der deutsche Gehörlose [The Deaf German].99
Wagner’s idealization of total deafness was certainly caused in some way by the
rise of industrialization, but Knittel’s suggestion that it reflects a nostalgia for a preindustrial time seems lacking. I would argue that Wagner’s idealization of total deafness
is directly in line with a new attitude towards disability that was brought on by
industrialization. In particular, the ascendance of social norms as a result of
industrialization may have been an external factor in separating Wagner’s perspective on
deafness from that of the early critics. The emergence of the idea of social norms took
place much later than popularly believed, and it colors our view of history significantly.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the language for describing normalcy did not
really exist. Lennard Davis gives the period 1840-1860 as the historical moment when the
idea of “the norm” comes into consciousness. In English, he explains, “the word ‘normal’
as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or
standard, regular, usual’ only enters the English language around 1840.”100 In German,
the first use of the term “normal” in this sense appears even later, in the mid-
99
Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2007), 57.
100
Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled
Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in Disability Studies Reader, 3.
65
1850s.101One of the developments that lead to this new concept was the emerging field of
statistics, a field that began as a means to compile data about the state. The term statistic
was first coined by Göttingen professor Gottfried Achen-wall, who used stat- to indicate
its original meaning, in 1749.102
It was only eighty years later that the concept of “political arithmetic” becomes
applied to the body. In 1829, a British physician named Bisset Hawkins minted medical
statistics by defining it as “the application of numbers to illustrate the natural history of
health and disease.”103 Not long after, in 1835, a French statistician named Adolphe
Quetelet took medical statistics a step further. He created the idea of “l’homme moyen,”
or average man, and “maintained that this abstract human was the average of all human
attributes in a given country.”104 Now there was an imagined figure against which people
could measure themselves. Medical statistics thus paved the way for a comparative
approach to medicine that used a fictitious measuring stick and helped to justify, through
mathematics, two important new concepts: the treatment of the minority as abnormal, and
a middle-class, average way of life.
The important point in relation to Beethoven, deafness, and Wagner’s essay is that
the emergence of the statistical approach to the human body caused people to be lumped
increasingly into “normal” or “abnormal” categories. Most of the early statisticians also
held eugenicist beliefs that the human race could be improved, or “normed,” and statistics
were viewed as a way to take measurements of the human race in order to reveal
101
Joseph Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 59/1 (Spring 2006), 132.
102
Ibid., 4.
103
Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), 24.
104
Davis, “Constructing Normalcy,” 4.
66
“problem areas.” As eugenics continued to grow in popularity as a way of looking at the
human race, people became solely identified with the “problem area” that they
represented, e.g. deaf person, crippled person, etc. The birth of census-taking further
made the fitting of people into discrete categories seem like a natural thing to do. One of
the conventions of the census, as Benedict Anderson notes, is the impermissibility of
fractions, which requires someone to answer Yes or No to a question like “Are you
deaf?”105
Since the rise of statistical thinking in regard to human attributes arose between
the time of Beethoven’s death and 1870, this may be one reason why Wagner chose to
categorize Beethoven as strictly a “deaf composer” rather than as a composer who went
deaf. The idea of “total deafness” reinforces this black-and-white categorization by
creating an image of Beethoven that is in no way “hearing.” Where Beethoven’s early
critics saw deafness as imperfect hearing, Wagner recreates deafness as identity.
The deaf history perspective seems to offer plausible explanations for the second
of the two questions brought up above: why would Wagner reverse his interpretation of
deafness three years later? It is perhaps significant that the centenary essay, a document
so explicitly nationalistic, is the only time when Wagner associates deafness so closely
with Beethoven’s identity and genius. Given that medical statistics since the birth of the
field had been bound up with measuring both the health of the individual and the health
of the nation, it makes sense that Wagner would identify Beethoven as categorically deaf
within his discussion of the health of the German nation. The fact that the 1873 document
is a discussion not about nationalism, but about the details of musical interpretation of a
105
Benedict Anderson, “Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality,” in
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and the
Social Text Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 125.
67
particular work (albeit a work that bore a great deal of German nationalist significance),
perhaps prompted Wagner to allow the image of Beethoven’s deafness as a defect back
into the mix. Consider: Wagner’s aboutface is not nearly so lacking in hindsight as it
appears, but that it reflects the rhetorical demands of public constructions of disability,
which were closely tied to nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Regarding why the Beethoven centenary essay has had such a lasting impact on
the reception of Beethoven, his deafness, and his late works in particular, it seems
plausible that the music community has embraced Wagner’s exaggerated image of
deafness because it so explicitly and poetically supports the notion of hearing as normal
and deafness as abnormal. To further demonstrate how Wagner’s essay participates in
hearing culture project of defining hearing as normal, in the next and final section we will
look at visual constructions of deafness in the essay.
Visual constructions of deafness in the Beethoven essay
“Total deafness” played a role in not only the construction of deafness as
identity, but also in the visual construction of deafness. The concept of total deafness
most importantly creates an absolute destination for Beethoven’s exploration of what in
Schopenhauerean terms represented the inner world-dream. To call Beethoven deaf in
and of itself would have conjured only a vague image that would reflect any number of
real-world examples from the deaf population. Total deafness is Wagner’s way of
illustrating deafness as a linear path along which Beethoven proceeded towards total
deafness, i.e. total immersion in the private inner realm.
68
For Wagner, “total deafness” was also a useful concept for removing deafness to a
metaphysical reality and avoiding the mountain of mystery and misinformation that
surrounded deafness in the medical community. As one doctor wrote in a popular
handbook on sight and hearing in 1859, “Deafness is so common and distressing an
infirmity, and often so incurable…It is less than ten years since statistics on this subject
began to be collected to any considerable degree; and they are not yet entirely to be relied
upon.”106 Many cures were tried, and many of them gruesome and potentially fatal.
Beethoven, as is well-known, tried all manner of cures, but a great deal still remained to
be understood about the causes of deafness by 1870. Medical science on diseases or
“hygiene” of the ear was still very speculative at least and experimental at best. Some of
the highly-regarded scientists of the day tried remedies that seem incredibly outlandish by
today’s medical understanding. For example, in 1866, the British doctor Joseph Toynbee,
who has been called the greatest nineteenth-century pioneer of scientific otology (the
science of diseases of the ear), accidentally killed himself while testing a cure for tinnitus.
The experimental cure, the instructions for which were found on lab notes near his body,
was to inhale vapors of prussic acid and chloroform while trying to blow air and foreign
matter out of his ears.107
Even mass entertainment was blamed by a prominent physician as a cause of
deafness. J. H. Curtis, whose title was “Aurist to the Late King,” in 1840 published a
book titled Present State of Aural Surgery, and suggested that conditions for poor at the
106
J. Henry Clark, A Popular Handbook: Sight and Hearing, How Preserved and How Lost (New York:
Charles Scribner, 1859), 260.
107
Douglas Guthrie, “The History of Otology,” The Journal of Laryngology and Otology 55 (Nov. 1940),
493.
69
theater could be deafening. In a section titled “Causes of Surditation or Deafness,” he
wrote
Among the most prevalent predisposing causes, are want of free ventilation, exposure to damp, or
sudden atmospheric changes—three of the most fatal agents with which the poor in our crowded
cities have to contend. Constant play-goers commonly become deaf—proceeding from sudden
exposure to the chill night-winds, after leaving the over-heated atmosphere of theatres, which are
never properly ventilated. The same circumstance is particularly remarkable in regard to
108
Bakers.
The absurdity of this medical opinion demonstrates how little doctors knew about
deafness. (It also provides a glimpse into the historical connections between deafness and
class, a subject far too broad to address here.) On the whole, much of the medical
discourse constituted a quagmire that Wagner needed to avoid in order to clearly state his
message. “Total deafness” seems to imply a medically incurable state, about which there
can be no grey area in diagnosis.
Once the idea of “total deafness” is in place, Wagner embarks on “an inquiry into
the evolution of Beethoven’s genius”—here in the word “evolution” we get the linear arc
that Wagner is trying to shape out of the night-realm of Schopenhauerean. This is a type
of visual construction of deafness, the idea that the deaf experience can have a distinct
shape. The linear arc of Beethoven’s deafness is an idea that other writers continue to
repeat. William Kinderman’s 2009 monograph Beethoven provides just example of recent
scholarship that continues to uphold Wagner’s visual construction of Beethoven’s
deafness: “Despite…now discredited attempts to characterize [Beethoven’s] late style as
a degeneration resulting from a lack of hearing, his art actually became richer as his
hearing declined.”109 Kinderman’s writing continues to position Beethoven’s deafness as
108
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Saturday, May 16, 1840 [Review of Curtis, J. H.
Aurist to the Late King, Present State of Aural Surgery: being the substance of a Lecture delivered at the
Royal Dispensary for Diseases of the Ear.]
109
William Kinderman, Beethoven (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71.
70
a tool that enhanced—or was perhaps even entirely responsible for—the composer’s
“genius.” This example is just one of many, and Wagner’s construction of deafness as
evolutionary rather than non-linear is today a very familiar idea that is often popularly
accepted uncritically.
The less subtle and more elaborate visual construction in the Beethoven essay is
the program to the Op. 131 C# minor string quartet. Wagner tells his readers that
Beethoven’s deafness allows him to explore fully explore an inner world in a way no one
else can. Then Wagner tries to provide a pictorial description of what Beethoven
experiences in this inner world by providing a program to the Op. 131 C# minor string
quartet. In this program, Wagner famously calls the quartet a “picture of a day from our
‘holy one’s’ life,” and suggests that the quartet is an “illustration of such a veritable day
in Beethoven’s inmost life.” Speaking for audience members listening to the quartet,
Wagner recommends that we should “give ourselves entirely to the direct revelation from
another world.”110
In the examples of visual constructions of deafness that I discussed in Chapter 1,
music scholars posited that Beethoven’s deafness, or his perception of the world as
altered by deafness, manifested itself somehow in specific musical passages. Like these
scholars, Wagner proposes that the Op. 131 quartet represents a window into Beethoven’s
altered perception. Wagner differs from the other scholars by suggesting that Beethoven
perceives a metaphysical, inner world, but essentially the idea is the same: that the music
helps to illustrate how Beethoven’s deafness has given him a different (Other) perception.
By representing deafness’s Otherness, in this case as a fantastical series of images,
Wagner’s program functions as another audiovisual construction to identify deafness.
110
Wagner, Beethoven, 96.
71
Here is the program to the Op. 131 quartet as Wagner published it in the
Beethoven centenary essay:
The lengthy opening Adagio, surely the saddest thing ever said in notes, I would term the awaking
on the dawn of a day "that in its whole long course shall ne'er fulfil one wish, not one wish!" Yet it
is alike a penitential prayer, a communing with God in firm belief of the Eternal Goodness.—The
inward eye then traces the consoling vision (Allegro 6/8), perceptible by it alone, in which that
longing becomes a sweet but plaintive playing with itself: the image of the inmost dream takes
waking form as a loveliest remembrance. And now (with the short transitional Allegro moderato)
'tis as if the master, grown conscious of his art, were settling to work at his magic; its resummoned force he practises (Andante 2/4) on the raising of one graceful figure, the blessed
witness of inherent innocence, to find a ceaseless rapture in that figure's never-ending, neverheard-of transformation by the prismatic changes of the everlasting light he casts thereon.—Then
we seem to see him, profoundly gladdened by himself, direct his radiant glances to the outer world
(Presto 2/2): once more it stands before him as in the Pastoral Symphony, all shining with his
inner joy; 'tis as though he heard the native accents of the appearances that move before him in a
rhythmic dance, now blithe now blunt (derb). He looks on Life, and seems to ponder (short
Adagio 3/4) how to set about the tune for Life itself to dance to: a brief but gloomy brooding, as if
the master were plunged in his soul's profoundest dream. One glance has shewn him the inner
essence of the world again: he wakes, and strikes the strings into a dance the like whereof the
world had never heard (Allegro finale). 'Tis the dance of the whole world itself: wild joy, the wail
of pain, love's transport, utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, riot, suffering; the lightning flickers, thunders
growl: and above it the stupendous fiddler who bans and bends it all, who leads it haughtily from
whirlwind into whirlpool, to the brink of the abyss—he smiles at himself, for to him this sorcery
111
was the merest play.—And night beckons him. His day is done.—
This program is notable for its emphasis on the visual sense, both in terms of
vision and images as seen by the inward eye, and this visual emphasis reflects a strong
tendency towards visual representation in attempts that “mark” disability. Within the
context of an essay that argues for hearing as the sense that will redeem society from its
reliance on the visual world of appearances, this emphasis on the visual even seems
ironic. The discrepancy here is mediated by Wagner’s underlying idea that inner vision is
not exactly like outward-directed vision. It seems that in the inner world, hearing and
vision blur together into a single true perception, as in a dream or a trance where the
subject becomes an essentially passive perceiver and no conscious filter separates one
sense or stimulus from another. In this concept, Beethoven can become “a world walking
111
Wagner, Beethoven, 97-98.
72
among men,” because his inner vision/hearing/perception filters nothing out.112 In this
concept of the inner world, we find similarities to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, where all
the arts engage the mind and senses together, enveloping the subject in a world of Art. So
the emphasis on vision in this Op. 131 program may be a metaphor for Wagner’s
conception of the expanded perception of the inner world. Even so, this program seems
out of place in ways that show how the program depicts both a metaphysical perception
and an Othered physical perception.
One reason why the program does not quite fit in the essay may be that it is one of
the few moments amid of sea of abstraction that references an actual piece of music.
Wagner does speak of other works, particularly the Ninth Symphony and the Coriolan
Overture (which Wagner uses to argue that the same “prodigious force” inspired both
Shakespeare and Beethoven to project their inner worlds outward into drama and music),
but the Op. 131 program is the only moment where Wagner deals directly with the details
of an entire work.113 Wagner has to provide something like this program because his
argument that Beethoven’s music can redeem society relies on the belief that people will
be able to listen to Beethoven, apprehend the purifying force of the inner world of Tone
in the music, and thus change their perspective on the outside world of Appearances. This
program acts essentially as a listening guide for redemption. Given the importance of this
moment where Wagner speaks to the readers as music listeners, it seems odd that Wagner
does not speak about listening in this way at greater length. The limited length of this
passage within the context of the long essay makes it seem like a token gesture to a
subject that requires a much more extended discussion.
112
113
Ibid., 92.
Ibid., 107-111.
73
A second reason that this program does not quite fit, and one that is important for
a discussion of how Wagner constructs deafness, is that Wagner initially conceived the
program many years before writing the Beethoven centenary essay. In 1855, Wagner
wrote a similar program for the Quartet-union in Zurich, which he was supervising at the
time. This early version is significantly more concise than his 1870 version, and it still
contains the same basic elements, but it importantly lacks any attempt to portray
Beethoven in a holy light beyond the reference to prayer in the Adagio, which simply
reflects the association of sacred music with the fugal opening:
(Adagio) Melancholy morning-prayer of a deeply suffering heart: (Allegro) graceful apparition,
rousing fresh desire of life. (Andante and variations). Charm, sweetness, longing, love.—Scherzo.
Whim, humour, high spirits.—Finale. Passing over to resignation. Most sorrowful
114
renunciation.
It is likely that the program originated from an even earlier time. In the years 1839-1841,
while Wagner was in Paris, he began working on a Beethoven biography that he never
published. However, Klaus Kropfinger has shown that “the ‘programmatic explanations’
were spin-offs from that project, and so were A Pilgrimage to Beethoven and the
Beethoven centenary essay.” 115 These prose writings—the programs, the novella A
Pilgrimage (1840), and the centenary essay—all constitute a more or less unified
approach to Beethoven, according to Kropfinger, despite the amount of time that
separates when they were written: “they differ in form and emphasis according to period
and, purpose and historical context…But in every case, Wagner visibly processed and
worked over biographical material in the same way.”116
114
Richard Wagner, A Sketch, A Reflection, and Four Programmes, translated by William Ashton Ellis in
Richard Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1896; reprint, New York:
Broude Brothers, 1966), 8:385-389, at 386.
115
Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner’s reception of Beethoven, translated by
Peter Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66.
116
Ibid., 66.
74
This is a significant statement, because the fact that the Op. 131 program
originated much earlier than 1870 presents a problem for understanding Wagner’s
construction of deafness. In the 1840s and 1850s, Wagner felt very differently about Op.
131, and the late works as a whole. At that time, his opinions were similar to those of the
critics I discussed in Chapter 1 in that he regarded Beethoven’s late music as problematic,
unmusical “sketches” with the exception of the Ninth Symphony. Thus, the Op. 131
quartet program originated as Wagner’s attempt to add some clarity for an audience to the
music of a musician who had lost control of his musical language, not a musician who
was composing music with redemptive power.
In the 1840s, like most critics Wagner explained away the problematic aspects of
the late works by invoking Beethoven’s deafness. In fact, he went one further than most
critics: in 1846, in a series of anonymous notices in the Dresdener Anzeiger that Wagner
wrote as publicity for the famous Palm Sunday concert (when on April 5 he conducted
the Ninth Symphony), he created a parable where Beethoven’s music is a projection of
Beethoven the deaf protagonist. Wagner wrote the parable, like his other programs, as a
kind of listening guide for the audience. On April 2, three days before the performance
Wagner published the following piece anonymously. It was the last of three notices (the
others appeared on March 24 and 31); presumably Wagner considered this parable the
most likely to bring audiences, since it was his final notice. This notice provides an
interesting companion piece to the Op. 131 quartet program.
There once lived a man who was impelled to express whatever he thought and felt in the language
of Tone, as bequeathed him by great masters. To speak in this tongue was his innermost need, to
hear it his sole happiness on earth; for he otherwise was poor in goods and joy, and people vexed
him sadly, however good and loving was his heart to all men. But his only happiness was reft from
him,—he fell deaf, and no longer might hear his own, his glorious language! Ah! he then came
near to wishing speech itself were also robbed him: his good spirit held him back;—he continued
to express in tones what he now had to feel as well. His feeling, however, had turned to something
marvelous and unaccustomed;—what other people thought of him, could but be foreign and
75
indifferent to him: he now had only to take counsel with his inner soul, to dive into the nearest
depths of the source of all passion and yearning. What a wondrous world he now became at home
in! There might he see and—hear; for there it needs no physical ear, to apprehend: creation and
delight are one.—But that world, alas! was the world of loneliness: how can a childlike-loving
heart belong to it for aye? The poor man turns his eye towards the world surrounding him,—to
Nature, in whose sweet ecstasies he once had revelled, to Men, to whom he yet feels so akin. A
tremendous longing seizes, thrusts, and drives him to belong to Earth again, to taste its thrills and
joys once more.—When you meet the poor man, who cries to you so longingly, will you pass him
on the other side if you find you do not understand his speech at once, if it sound so strange, so
unaccustomed, that you ask yourselves: What would the man? O take him to you, clasp him to
your heart, in wonder listen to the marvels of his tongue, in whose new wealth you soon will great
sublimities and grandeurs never heard of,—for this man is Beethoven, and the tongue in which he
speaks to you the tones of his Last Symphony, where the wonder-worker shaped all the sorrows,
117
joys and yearnings of his life to an artwork such as never was!
(bolded words in original)
In this notice, we can see many similarities to the Op. 131 program. Most importantly for
the understanding of Wagner’s construction of deafness, we see in both the 1846 notice
and the 1870 program a narrative in which Beethoven is a wandering protagonist
projected in his own music.
In both texts, Wagner encourages the reader to embrace the music. The key
difference is that in the notice, Wagner asks the audience to pity Beethoven, not to be in
awe of him. The deification of Beethoven that takes place in these texts by Wagner
between the 1840s and 1870 illustrates something crucial to understanding the
construction of deafness and disability. This is the simple fact that there is a thin, and
easily reversible, line between the divine and the deviant, and between genius and
pathology. In effect, both reflect a similar marginalizing approach to disability. As
Lennard Davis explains,
In the same way that women were seen as the moral center of European culture, their moral space
carved out on the body of their oppression, or the subaltern was seen as the cynosure of mystical
and erotic forces, so too does the attempt to redress the disability by attributing higher powers to it
118
actually attempt to erase the difference by dressing it in moral raiment.
117
Richard Wagner, Jottings on the Ninth Symphony, translated by William Ashton Ellis in Richard
Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1896; reprint, New York: Broude
Brothers, 1966), 8:201-203, at 202-203.
118
Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 104.
76
Conclusion In his Beethoven centenary essay, Wagner elevates Beethoven to the status of a
great Germanic hero whose deafness has bestowed on him the power to access and then
bring forth the music that will redeem humankind. The key to the power of his deafness
is that it helped to focus his mind inward on a mystical world that is above all a world of
sound, not of sight. The World of Appearances is the contaminated visual world, and in
Wagner’s view the visual world is dominated by all things French, who privilege surface
over substance. “Far as our eye can roam, the Mode commands us,” he writes.119
There is an important irony surrounding Wagner’s argument. As I mentioned in
Chapter 1, less than a century earlier French revolutionaries and philosophes had also
elevated deaf people to the level of model citizens of the nation. The language of deaf
people was, in the words of Charles-Maurice Talleyrand in 1791, “perhaps the first
method for making the mind perfectly analytical and for putting it on guard against the
multitude of errors that we owe to the imperfection of our [ordinary, vocal] signs.”120
Deaf people alone, claimed the Abbé Grégoire in a famous speech given at the height of
the Reign of Terror, had learned to think “following the path of nature.”121 An additional
irony lies in the fact that for the French, it was the deaf community’s visual language that
inspired revolutionary rhetoric. More than one revolutionary proposed teaching sign
119
Wagner, Beethoven, 120.
Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du comité de constitution à
l’assemblèe nationale, les 10, 11, et 19 septembre 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791), 100-101, in
Sophia Rosenfeld, “The Political Uses of Sign Language: The Case of the French Revolution,” Sign
Language Studies 6/1 (Fall, 2005), 19.
121
Abbé H.-B. Grégoire, Convention nationale. Instruction publique. Rapport sur la nécessité et les
moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française: séance de 16 prairial, l’an
deuxième de la république (1794; repr. In Une politique de la langue: la revolution française et les patois:
l’enquête de Grégoire, ed. M. de Certeau, D. Julia, and J. Revel [Paris: Gallimard, 1975]), 316, in
Rosenfeld, 19.
120
77
language to all French children in schools. For Wagner of course, the power of
Beethoven’s music is that it is divorced from the visual world.
This brief observation simply serves as one more illustration that constructions of
deafness can be both arbitrary and historically situated, just like language. Wagner’s
redefinition of Beethoven’s deafness is a result of both his own agendas and the way the
historical moment shaped the public identity of deafness in 1870. As musicologists, we
can understand more about the impact and origins of Wagner’s redefinition of deafness if
we do not leave out the history of the disability itself.
Wagner’s essay constructs normalcy, in terms of hearing, by elevating
Beethoven’s deafness to metaphysical heights. Such a construction only seems on the
surface a radical departure from the view of deafness as a disability. Yet there is no
fundamental difference between these two views; they each banish the disabled person to
one side of the bell curve of human normalcy. It is for this reason that Wagner’s essay
has had such a lasting impact on reception of Beethoven’s biography, his deafness, and
the late works. And it is the lasting impact of this essay that should provoke further
challenges to its true implications for the image of deafness.
78
Chapter 3: The Beethoven Biopic and the Cinema of Isolation
The mythology of Beethoven’s deafness really crystallized around Wagner’s
centenary essay and thus it predates film. Cinematic portrayals of Beethoven began in the
early years by responding to the mythology already in the audience’s mind, for the most
part by simply recreating the stereotypes of the pathological, supernatural deaf genius
that were by the twentieth century already familiar to everyone. In fact, throughout its
history film has done very little to challenge the constructions of deafness projected by
the Beethoven myth. If anything, film has exaggerated these constructions to the point
where they appear like ridiculous caricatures of Beethoven and of disability; these
exaggerations then begin to turn back on the myth, unintentionally (and in rare cases,
intentionally) critiquing the premises that they are reinscribing.
Beethoven biopics take the construction of deafness to a whole new level in
several important ways. First, the broad palette of film techniques allows Beethoven’s
deafness to be presented visually in ways not possible before film. Second, film extends
radically reinscribes the physicalization of Beethoven. Where Wagner simply emphasized
the physicality of Beethoven through “divine” pathology, Beethoven biopics go one step
further by actually re-embodying Beethoven through the physical presence of an actor.
Third, biopics always recreate Beethoven’s Vienna, and films almost without exception
use this opportunity to create a fantasy Vienna in which deafness always signifies social
isolation and pathological defects. No member of the deaf community, nor anyone
associated with the Taubstummeninstitut, for example, ever appears in a Beethoven
biopic.
79
One might be tempted to blame this treatment of deafness on inferior filmmaking,
but in fact the notorious moments of kitsch, camp, and cliché associated with the onscreen Beethoven appear in virtually all film representations of the composer—even
those by reputable directors and actors. Clearly an entrenched historical and institutional
bias is at work. Beethoven biopics take great pains to construct connections between
disability and genius, positioning the composer as the ultimate “damaged” creator. They
reproduce the myth of Beethoven as it was famously and succinctly summarized by
Victor Hugo: “If it was ever evident that soul and body are not joined, it is Beethoven
who proved it…Crippled body, flying soul.”125 In this conception, deafness has no place
as a public identity—it has no real context, but is only the producer of a pathological
body. We flock to see Ed Harris or Gary Oldman display Beethoven as disabled in order
to perpetuate the construction of deafness as marginal or inhuman. This is part of the
voyeuristic nature of such films, and what opens them up most clearly to criticism.
In summary, in this chapter I argue that Beethoven biopics participate in the
historical process of the visual construction of deafness, a process which has been
controlled by societal norms which define deafness as pathological. In these films,
deafness is exclusively an internally-felt affliction; there is no credence given to the idea
that deafness could have a publically constructed identity, or that a deaf person could
exist as a “normal person” in society. Furthermore, it is the extent to which these films
bend over backwards to construct deafness as purely a private experience that generates
many of the elements which critics and scholars have criticized. Ultimately, the most
problematic moments in these films can often be read as unwitting critiques of one-sided,
125
Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare. Quoted in Leo Schrade, Beethoven in France: The Growth of an
Idea (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 83-84.
80
able-body-biased constructions of disability in general, and deafness in particular. In the
following sections, I will explain why these films show deafness as an exclusively private
affliction, and how they do it.
I could not possibly conduct a thorough study of existing Beethoven biopics in a
single chapter, and as such I have chosen my examples from a handful of representative
films: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (1920s), Abel Gance’s Un Grand Amour de
Beethoven (1936), Beethoven Lives Upstairs (1991), Immortal Beloved (1994), Copying
Beethoven (2006), and Charles Hazlewood’s three-part BBC production, Beethoven
(2005). In limiting this chapter to these six films, I have had to resist including other
films such as Sincerely Yours (1955, starring a 36-year-old Liberace as a deaf pianist in
his only feature film role), The Magnificent Rebel (1962, a Disney made-for-TV movie
starring Karlheinz Böhm, son of the conductor Karl Böhm, as Beethoven), Ludwig Van
(1970), and Le Neveu de Beethoven (1985), among others.126
Institutional biases against disability in film It comes as no surprise to anyone who has engaged with disability studies that
Beethoven biopics construct deafness as marginal. Film is a famously able-body biased
medium, and many scholars have written about the institutional biases that have
reappeared over and over again since the beginning of cinema. The primary function of
films that deal with disability, as Lennard Davis explains, is to make the disability “part
126
I should also note that the remarks of this chapter on the whole do not apply to Mauricio Kagel’s
brilliant film Ludwig Van, which does deal with the public image of deafness in revealing and fascinating
ways. However, it does so only because it is not a commercial film; this circumstance allows it greater
freedom to deviate from public conceptions of deafness and disability. It is an experimental film that
challenges the conventions of film and of Beethoven biopics in particular;significantly, however, Kagel’s
conception of the film is likely not responding to the deaf community, which in 1970 was just beginning to
embrace sign language and Deaf culture and was much less “visible” than it is today.
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of a chronotope, a time-sequenced narrative,” or in other words, to embed it in a story.
“By narrativizing an impairment,” Davis continues, “one tends to sentimentalize it and
link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of the individual
story.”127 In the case of Beethoven, the individual story of deafness precludes any
representation of a socially constructed deafness.
Davis also makes the point that disability lies at the center of the most
compelling, and often-told, tales in films. “The cinematic experience,” he writes, “far
from including disabilities in an ancillary way, is powerfully arranged around the
management and deployment of disabled and ‘normal’ bodies.” Films are “drawn
obsessively to the topic of disability,” he explains, because the inherent voyeuristic nature
of film makes the image of the body, placed in extreme circumstances, into a spectacle
and a commodity.128 For audiences of a majority of people who think of themselves as
able-bodied, film offers many more opportunities to peer in on the lives of disabled
people than real life. The more the film emphasizes the disabledness of a character, the
more enhanced becomes the sense of spectacle.
Martin Norden, whose book The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical
Disability in the Movies has significantly informed the work of other disability studies
scholars (including Davis), notes that changes in the visibility of disabled people in recent
years could potentially have an effect on the way that film portrays disability as
spectacle, but so far the stereotypes in the film industry are slow to respond to changes in
social awareness:
The process of mainstreaming—bringing disabled people out of institutions and into the
mainstream of society, allowing them and able-bodied people to learn from each other—has by its
127
128
Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verson, 1995).
Ibid., 153.
82
very nature weakened the trend toward isolation, but unfortunately it has done little to vitiate the
129
moviemaker tendency to characterize disabled people as isolated individuals.
The issue of the isolation of disabled people in film is crucial for Norden; the
central argument of his book is that “movies have tended to isolate disabled characters
from their able-bodied peers as well as from each other.”130 The isolation of Beethoven
from other hearing people is of course the crux of the mythology of Beethoven
(succinctly encapsulated in the line in Copying Beethoven where Beethoven declares
“Loneliness is my religion!”). Following Norden, it should also be noted that films and
literature isolate Beethoven from other deaf people, providing so little social context for
deafness that it seems as if Beethoven might be the only deaf person in nineteenthcentury Vienna.
While little is known about Beethoven’s attitudes towards other deaf people, he
does mention hearing stories about them in his letters. It seems difficult to imagine that
Beethoven was not at least curious, given his voracious desire to understand his own
deafness, about the community of deaf students that had been growing in Vienna since
the late eighteenth century. These students came to Vienna to study at the
Taubstummeninstitut, which had been established in 1779 as part of Joseph II’s
enlightened reforms. Perhaps Beethoven visited the Institute in secret; it was certainly
something of a vogue among intellectuals (at least those who did not bear the stigma of
deafness) to visit these institutes. For example, Goethe visited the Leipzig school for
deaf-mutes in 1800, Samuel Johnson famously visited and was amazed by the pupils at
Thomas Braidwood’s Academy for the Deaf and Dumb in Edinburgh 1773, and many
129
Martin Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 2.
130
Ibid., 1.
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European intellectuals and political figures attended the Abbé de l’Épée’s deaf classes in
Paris. The Viennese deaf community continued to grow during the nineteenth century,
but it has had no place in any film or scholarly narratives of Beethoven to date.131
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, two disability scholars well-known for their
work on narrative prosthesis, have argued that a lack of awareness of disability issues on
the part of the wider public gives people in positions of creative power (like writers and
filmmakers) greater freedom to shape (and distort) the image of disability. “Without
developed models for analyzing the purpose and function of representational strategies of
disability,” Mitchell and Snyder write, “readers [and film audiences] tend to filter a
multitude of disability figures absently through their imaginators.”132 Film and disability
scholar Paul Longmore’s work has outlined the conventions which the “imaginators” so
often use in film to filter disability. Like Lennard Davis, Longmore finds it striking that
disability is a pervasive presence in cinema, and his work asks the questions
Why are there so many disabled characters, and why do we overlook them so much of the time?
Why do television and film so frequently screen disabled characters for us to see, and why do we
133
usually screen them out of our consciousness even as we absorb those images?
Longmore answers by arguing that when we watch television and film portraits of
disability, we screen them out because we are trained to compartmentalize impairment as
an isolated and individual condition of existence. One of the primary ways that films
screen out disability is to filter them through stereotypes (Longmore describes examples
of the disabled character as monster, as criminal, as maladjusted, etc.) Because these
disability constructions fit so neatly into stereotypes that filmgoers know very well,
131
As I have noted earlier, one reason for this lack of attention to the Viennese deaf community is the
scarcity of historical work on German and Austrian deaf communities, as compared to the historical work
available on American deaf communities.
132
Pg. 207
133
Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and other essays on disability (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2003), 131-132.
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Longmore explains that film encourages us to separate these stories rather than put them
together and see them as evidence of a wider systemic problem.
The methods by which films visually construct deafness connect the audience to
these stereotypes and train viewers to perceive and understand deafness in particular
ways. This is not only a problem of historical inaccuracy or kitsch; these films make
stereotypical, discriminatory ideas about deafness seem normal. John Schuchman, a deaf
studies scholar who is hearing but has deaf parents, explains that “the deaf characters I
have seen on movie screens and on television bear little resemblance to the deaf people or
community that I knew as a boy or that I know today as a professional in daily contact
with deaf people.” As Schuchman goes on to argue in his book, Hollywood Speaks:
Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry,
The film and television industries have dealt with deafness in a manner similar to their stereotyped
treatment of ethnic and racial minorities. Thus, entertainment has been a substantial contributor to
the public’s general misunderstanding of deafness and to the perpetuation of attitudes that permit
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discrimination against deaf citizens.
The perpetuation of stereotypes is also a key problem for Norden. His work
sensitizes the scholar to the ways in which films manipulate the perspectives of both
characters and audience members both to render disability spectacular and to
conventionalize stereotypes of disability. In both cases, the impact on the disability
community is negative. As he explains,
Audience positioning within the films becomes a critical issue, for more often than not
moviemakers photograph and edit their works to reflect an able-bodied point of view…By
encouraging audience members to perceive the world depicted in the movies, and by implication
the world in general, from this perspective and thus associate themselves with able-bodied
characters, this strategy has a two-fold effect: it enhances the disabled characters’ isolation and
“Otherness” by reducing them to objectifications of pity, fear, scorn, etc.—in short, objects of
spectacle—as a means of pandering to the needs of the able-bodied majority, and it contributes to
135
a sense of isolation and self-loathing among audience members with disabilities.
134
John S. Schuchman, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999), ix-x.
135
Norden, 2.
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As Norden argues here, bias against disability in film does not only manifest itself
in static conventions that reappear over and over again. On some level, these conventions
respond in dynamic ways to the market that is dominated by the able-bodied majority of
audience members. Able-bodied audience attitudes towards disability, and the
construction of disability in film, interact in a cyclical relationship where one shapes and
is simultaneously shaped by the other. Within this relationship, there is certainly the
potential for audiences and filmmakers to introduce new attitudes towards disability.
However, there are two main reasons why, as Norden notes above, wider cultural
attitudes towards disability have begun to change as a result of mainstreaming while
cinematic stereotypes have changed very little in comparison.
The first reason is that film is the most visually compelling medium we have, as
well as the most widely distributed; therefore, it is the most effective arena for defining
the “normal” body by visualizing the “abnormal” body.136 In film, the able-bodied
audience’s anxieties about the boundaries between the able-bodied and disabled can play
out dramatically, be negotiated, and receive an outlet. The second reason is that the
history of film has been marked by a trend towards greater and greater manipulation of
the senses. The most revolutionary moment in film history, in terms of this trend, is of
course the premiere of The Jazz Singer in 1927, which marked the transition from early
film to “talkies.” Today, quality in entertainment is consistently defined by higher fidelity
sound systems, higher definition images, and the extent to which an audience feels it can
become immersed in the world of the film itself. Filmmakers, generally speaking, pursue
their audiences through sight and sound down to the last detail, in order to control their
136
Davis, 151.
86
audience’s reactions. Deaf and blind audiences fall outside of the target audience for most
filmmakers, in part because they are not as subject to film’s sensory manipulations.
It is often forgotten that before The Jazz Singer, film-going was an experience
that offered more to both deaf and hearing people.137 According to Schuchman, “older
citizens who are deaf or hard of hearing recall the years of silent films (1893-1929) as a
‘golden era’ in the cultural history of the American Deaf community.”138 Both deaf and
hearing actors had to act via gesture, and on screen, sign language gained a measure of
belonging that it did not have off the screen. In fact, films were used by the National
Association of the Deaf (NAD) to bind deaf audiences together through sign language at
a difficult time in the history of the deaf community. It was during the time of the early
films that an intense campaign against sign language was being lead by American oralists
who wished to ban sign language completely. Film offered opportunities for deaf
filmmakers to challenge the arguments that sign language was not a legitimate language
and that deaf people could not form a community. They did this by showing sign
language in action and therefore showing its vitality, and by documenting the activities of
the deaf community.139
Following the birth of the talkies, opportunities for deaf filmmakers became much
more scarce. Much more recently, the dawn of Youtube has reopened the door for deaf
filmmakers to mass-distribute films that feature sign language. The internet in general has
allowed deaf communities to communicate through video in many ways: deaf poets can
137
The notion that early cinema was silent has been discredited by Rick Altman, who complicates
Schuchman’s argument. However, it is still true that older generations of deaf people look at early film as
an important means of deaf expression.
138
John S. Schuchman, “The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community’s
Response,” Sign Language Studies 4/3 (Spring, 2004), 231-238.
139
Ibid. 232.
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show their sign language poetry online, deaf people can chat in sign, etc., and all of these
interactions have become accessible to both deaf community members and hearing
people. Through the internet, the deaf community has become visible on its own terms in
ways not possible in film since the 1920s. It remains to be seen in what fashion the film
industry moves to react to this new development, although there have certainly been signs
of changing attitudes.
Coming back to Beethoven, and to film depictions of his deafness, I would argue
that they not only conform to long-standing stereotypes of disability-representation, but
also they reinscribe old deaf-centric constructions of Beethoven’s subjectivity and
creativity, following Wagner. The fact that these films continue to marginalize deafness
into the twenty-first century using nineteenth-century constructions of deafness, genius,
and disability, is significant because these constructions ignore and resist important
cultural shifts in the acceptance of the deaf community. As deafness becomes
“mainstreamed,” to use Norden’s term, and as the deaf community continues to reclaim
film as a medium that is well-suited for sign language, the continual isolation of deaf
characters and Beethoven specifically in film serves to redraw the boundaries between
hearing and deaf people.
The techniques of isolation In film in general, any technique can and has been used to construct disability as
private. Most importantly, these films try to show Beethoven’s isolation from both
outside and inside his point-of-view. When the films isolate Beethoven from others, they
effectively cut off any possibility of exploring a socially constructed deafness or deaf
community. When they portray his point-of-view, they almost seem to indicate that even
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if there was a connection between Beethoven and a socially constructed deafness, his
individual experience is so unique, so inhuman even, that it could not possibly relate to
anyone else’s experience.
In the Beethoven biopics under discussion, we can see the playing out of at least
six different strategies for isolating Beethoven in his deafness (and rendering it the
defining feature of both his life and his creative process---in other words, featuring
disability as spectacle). These strategies work separately and together to shape deafness
on screen; below I will discuss particularly clear examples for each strategy, but these
strategies appear in instances far too numerous to discuss comprehensively. The six
strategies are: one, the use of film techniques that either set Beethoven apart or shape the
audience’s understanding of Beethoven’s point of view as isolated; two, the emphasis on
bodily death and decay that allow Beethoven’s deafness to be presented as an allconsuming disability; three, animalia references that associate Beethoven with crude
physicality; four, “Beauty and the Beast” scenarios that clearly locate Beethoven as a
cultural ‘Other’; five, visual references that show Beethoven as a quasi-cyborg, again,
distancing him from the category of ‘normal’ or ‘able’; and six, disability drag, which
displaces disability by allowing an able-bodied to control how disability is portrayed.
The first strategy, the use of film techniques to isolate Beethoven or to show how
his point of view is “different,” is ubiquitous in Beethoven biopics. Indeed, this strategy
is constantly found in films dealing with disability in general; as Norden explains, the
isolation of disability in film
is reflected not only in the typical storylines of the films but also to a large extent in the ways that
filmmakers have visualized the characters interacting in their environments; they have often used
the basic tools of their trade—framing, editing, sound, lighting, set-design elements (e.g., fences,
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windows, staircase banners)—to suggest physical or symbolic separation of disabled characters
140
from the rest of society.
In the interest of space, three very different examples will have to suffice as
representative of this strategy. The first is an example of camerawork and editing that
move the audience into Beethoven’s point of view. In Copying Beethoven, in a scene in
the middle of the film, Beethoven (played by Ed Harris) engages in a heated argument
with his copyist, Anna Holtz (a fictional character played by Diane Kruger), over his
nephew Karl. As the argument escalates, Beethoven becomes more and more agitated
about Anna forgetting to look at him when she speaks. At the same time, we begin to get
some close-up shots of Anna’s face from Beethoven’s perspective. Then, at the breaking
point, as Beethoven yells “What?!” the camera suddenly begins to frenetically zoom in
on Anna Holtz’s mouth. At this moment, the camera has switched to the point-of-view of
Beethoven, and shows the viewer Beethoven’s agitation at not being able to read Anna’s
lips. Here, the camera demonstrates how Beethoven’s vision is a symptom of his
Otherness, by employing an unusual film technique to represent its difference. The
zooming is an unnatural way to represent a human being’s vision, turning it into
something more mechanical than human. It also provides another visual enactment of
isolation: by limiting the vision of the spectator, it metaphorically represents a limited
access to the world. No other character’s point-of-view in the film is represented by
anything like this kind of camerawork.
A second example, from Immortal Beloved, in a much less subtle way marks
Beethoven visually as an isolated figure. In the establishing shot (Figure 6), darkness
shrouds Beethoven’s face as he lies on his deathbed. This moment powerfully visualizes
140
Norden, 1.
90
Beethoven’s isolation and sets the tone for the entire film. Through lighting, the director
Bernard Rose turns Beethoven into a monster-character, creating the visual impression of
a man unwhole, and likely referencing a kind of Gothic quality by visually alluding to the
Phantom of the Opera with the face half-obscured, half-lit. Again, here, we are focused
on the face—the mouth, the ear, the eyes—i.e. the locus of Beethoven’s sensory
disability. The only light in the scene is natural light from bursts of violent lightning, an
effect that ties Beethoven to violent nature and helps to render him an object, or a Gothic
creature, rather than a man.
Figure 6 Opening shot of Immortal Beloved
The third example, from Un Grand Amour de Beethoven, demonstrates a
sophisticated integration of techniques that invite the audience into Beethoven’s point of
view and mark him as different. The example is the most famous scene from this film,
which depicts Beethoven losing his hearing inside a windmill in Heiligenstadt, and it is
worth describing in detail. The scene opens with bold, all-capital-letter title text declaring
VINT LE MATIN LE PLUS TRAGIQUE DE LA VIE DE BEETHOVEN [The most tragic
morning of Beethoven’s life arrived]. This scene is justly famous for the artistic ways in
which it visually constructs and dramatizes the onset of deafness (a process which in this
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scene literally takes just moments). First of all, the setting; Beethoven (played by Harry
Baur) is huddled inside an old windmill which is small and cluttered with wooden
furniture and enough wild vegetation that it appears like a forest is pushing through the
walls and threatening the integrity of the whole structure. As the scene opens, two things
trap the audience’s gaze and hearing, giving the scene an extremely claustrophobic
feeling. Visually, the only connection between the room and the outside world is a
window, and it is clearly ominously blocked by the giant windmill blades that turn past it.
Aurally, the ominous sound of an inhuman, mechanical noise, which we immediately
recognize as the mechanical recreation of a tinnitus-like sound that in this case precedes
deafness, quickly grows into an oppressive presence. The turning windmill blades and the
sound appear to be linked rhythmically, and thus they conspire to give the audience an
audiovisual impression of Beethoven’s imprisoning hearing. The whole effect is quite
Freudian, giving the impression of a womb-like chamber and implying Beethoven’s
return to a primitive, pre-rational state. From the beginning of the scene, the camera
zooms forward slowly towards Beethoven’s face as he becomes more and more disturbed
by this noise, which continues to crescendo. There is a boy in the room with Beethoven,
Pierrot, and a few times Beethoven asks Pierrot if he hears the noise. The camera cuts
each time to Pierrot for his replies, and the noise then stops briefly when the camera is on
Pierrot’s face, confirming that only Beethoven is hearing the noise. Each time the camera
cuts back to Beethoven, the noise has grown quite a bit louder, and Beethoven begins to
grab at his face and ears, finally erupting in cries of anguish as the camera cuts to an
extreme closeup. Beethoven begins to weep as the sound begins to decrescendo as
suddenly as it arrived, but we know that Beethoven has just become “stone-deaf” because
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he immediately taps a wine-bottle, and we hear nothing. Then Beethoven walks over to
the piano and bangs on it, and again we hear nothing, since we have entered Beethoven’s
point of view. Beethoven then asks Pierrot to play the piano, and when the boy touches
the keys, we hear the piano, visually connecting the sound to the point-of-view of the
boy. When Pierrot touches the keys, Beethoven asks him if he hears the piano; the boy
replies several times that he does, but Beethoven cannot understand him. Then the boy
writes in chalk on the piano, “I hear the piano.” At this moment, as we see Beethoven
realizing what has just happened, the opening of the Fifth Symphony begins to play,
sealing Beethoven’s fate symbolically.
Beethoven then gets up to leave the windmill as the boy sits down and begins to
cry, showing the audience the appropriate response to such a moment. The camera then
cuts to an-outside shot, showing Beethoven entering the outside world accompanied only
by the sound of his own music. What follows are a series of beautiful images of
Beethoven in nature, looking mournful, but clearly trying to commune with nature. At
this moment, the titles return with the words LA VOIX DE L’AIMÉE…LA VOIX DE
LA FORÊT…LE CHANT DE OISEAUX...PLUS JAMAIS!...PLUS JAMAIS! [The
voice of the beloved…The voice of the forest…The song of the birds… Nevermore!...
Nevermore!] In the next scene, a fiddler is playing part of the storm movement from the
Pastoral Symphony to a group of children (the fiddler, not coincidentally is disabled,
half-blind as indicated by an eyepatch). As Beethoven enters the frame the sound of the
violin fades out to silence. Now, it is clear, Beethoven carries silence with him wherever
he goes. The camera cuts to a closeup of Beethoven’s face, cloaked in shadow, then we
return to the scene with the fiddler, and as Beethoven exits the frame, the fiddler’s music
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fades up again. Finally, after a series of silent images that show Beethoven’s inability to
hear, and after the boy lies and says he cannot hear anything either, Beethoven walks
over to a river, looks down and sees the image of his deathmask in the water. Once again,
the opening of the Fifth Symphony breaks the silence.
In prose form, this scene is compelling enough, and on screen it is even more so. I
will return to this scene as I discuss the other strategies, because it uses several of them.
In terms of techniques that bring the audience into the disabled point-of-view, the most
interesting is the alternation of silence and noise with normal audio to indicate the two
perspectives of the hearing boy and the now-deaf Beethoven. Michel Chion has discussed
this scene, specifically the moment when Beethoven encounters the fiddler; he argues
that the silence attached to Beethoven represents “the most extreme case of subjective
sound.” 141 Chion describes the transition, over a continuous shot, from sound to silence
as a transition from “objective” listening to “subjective” deafness. Here, Chion argues
that deafness is signified by silence, by isolation, and by subjectivity.
Robyn Stillwell’s concept of the “fantastical gap” between diegetic and nondiegetic sound may offer a different take on this moment, and others like it where the
“sound” of deafness is “heard” in the film. Stillwell defines the “fantastical gap” as a kind
of luminal space where the classification of the sound as diegetic or non-diegetic is
deeply unclear. Stillwell’s concept is useful because it complicates Chion’s argument that
silence represents the subjectivity of deafness. All sounds in cinema that represent the
sound of deafness are fantasies of deafness; in this sense, there is little difference between
the harrowing mechanical, tinittus-like sound heard in the windmill scene in Gance’s film
141
Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia Press, 2009),
298.
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or the silence heard afterwards. Both types of sound serve to Other Beethoven’s point-ofaudition, or his aural perspective. In fact, we might think of hearing itself as a type of
diegetic perception within film, because it belongs to the world of film in which hearing
is always normalized. Deafness itself, represents a kind of non-diegetic perception
because it fundamentally does not belong to the world of film, as the dominant ablebodied conventions of cinema dictate. Therefore, any moment where the “sound”
of deafness enters the world of film recreates a “fantastical gap” between hearing and
deafness.
The second strategy for isolating deafness, the emphasis on bodily death and
decay, the previous two examples already provide plenty to talk about. The example from
Immortal Beloved is important because it comes from the first moment of the film; as
such, it represents a strangely common convention in Beethoven biopics—the killing off
of the main character at or near the beginning of the film. Copying Beethoven, Immortal
Beloved, Beethoven Lives Upstairs all begin with images of Beethoven dead or on the
precipice of death; the BBC film series Beethoven shows a living Beethoven, but begins
with the Ninth Symphony and with narration of the Heiligenstadt Testament, both of
which signal at least lateness, if not death (Beethoven’s social death, certainly). Only Un
Grand Amour de Beethoven, of the films in my small sample, does not begin with a dead
or dying Beethoven (the early film Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is too short for this
convention to be possible). This emphasis on death and decay constructs disability itself
as a form of death, which is the ultimate form of isolation.
Like the Immortal Beloved example, the example from Un Grand Amour de
Beethoven also uses close-ups of the face, shrouded in shadow, to indicate death, or
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dehumanization. The association with death is confirmed when Beethoven sees his face
reflected back as his own death mask. All of these examples, and many more, support the
Romantic notion that the “crippled body” must die in order for the “flying soul” to break
free. Beethoven’s deafness is merely a symptom of the body, which is inherently already
crippled and imperfect in comparison to the soul.
Related to this strategy is the third technique: animalia references that associate
the body with bestiality and crude primitivism and thus locate the deaf Beethoven outside
the realm of reason and therefore of humanity. This link has roots in the nineteenthcentury, when Beethoven was often associated with animals. Luigi Cherubini, for
instance, called Beethoven “an unlicked bear,” Berlioz’s favorite term of endearment for
Beethoven was “that indefatigable eagle,” and Max Klinger’s famous statue of the
Promethean Beethoven features a large eagle seated at the composer’s feet. In films,
however, animal references tend to demean Beethoven’s image rather than elevate it.
Instead of eagles and bears, we find references such as “pig-face,” “donkey,” “The
Beast!” and more indirectly, a slobbering St. Bernard. Perhaps the most ridiculous
example is the dialogue between Herr Schlemmer and Anna Holtz near the beginning of
Copying Beethoven.
HERR SCHLEMMER: You must go back to Rauch. Tell him to send someone else. ANNA
HOLTZ: You insisted on his best student. And forgive me, Herr Schlemmer, I may be a woman
but I am the best student. I’m certainly capable of any copying tasks you might have.
HERR SCHLEMMER: Do you know why you’re here? Do you know whom we’re talking about?
ANNA HOLTZ: No Dr. Rauch didn’t explain…
HERR SCHLEMMER: The Beast!
ANNA HOLTZ: The beast?
HERR SCHLEMMER: Beethoven!
These animal references attempt to marginalize the disabled body by linking it to “subhuman” animals. The image of deafness as a kind of bestializing condition reinscribes
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eighteenth- and nineteenth century concepts of the deaf person as beyond reason, or
beyond religious salvation. In these films, the connection between animalia and
Beethoven become ridiculous caricatures of these century-old biases. It is possible that
animal references in films tend towards the crude associations because the belief that
nature can be a source of genius no longer has cultural credence; so these films mirror the
nineteenth century use of animal references, but instead of marginalizing and exalting,
they merely marginalize.
The fourth strategy, what I call the Beauty and the Beast scenario, reappears
constantly in these films. Over and over again, Beethoven is paired with a non-disabled
character, or sometimes multiple characters, who usually control the narration. In
Immortal Beloved, it is Anton Schindler and by extension the three women who loved
Beethoven; in Copying Beethoven, it is Anna Holtz; in Beethoven Lives Upstairs, it is the
young boy Christoph; in Un Grand Amour de Beethoven, in the deafness scene, it is the
young boy Pierrot. The BBC film Beethoven and the early film Beethoven’s Moonlight
Sonata both present variations on this strategy. In the former, it is not just one ablebodied person who tells Beethoven’s story for him, but rather all of Beethoven
acquaintances, portrayed by actors, who tell his story in an interview-based documentary
style. In the early film, Beethoven encounters a beautiful woman who he determines to be
his creative equal, but interestingly, the disability roles are reversed here: Beethoven is
not yet deaf, but he is surprised to find, it is all of Beethoven acquaintances, portrayed by
actors, who tell his story. The film is so short, that it is possible to provide the complete
description of events:
Beethoven (played by Warren Rogers) and an unnamed (and uncredited) companion are out
walking in the moonlight, and as they walk by a house they hear someone playing piano inside.
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Then we see a woman (played by Alice Calhoun) inside the house playing piano while her brother
sits at a table apart from her. The camera cuts back to Beethoven, who says: “Here is feeling-genius--understanding.” Then we see the woman again, who gets up from the piano and says, “It is
so beautiful, I can not do it justice.” The brother gets up and goes over to her, as she says, “Oh
what would I not give to go the concert at Cologne.” To which the brother replies, “Ah, my sister.
Why create regrets, when we can scarcely pay our rent.” Next, the camera returns to Beethoven,
who nods and says, “I will play for her.” His companion protests, but Beethoven proceeds to barge
into the house and says to the siblings, “I overheard her wish, and shall play for her.” As
Beethoven walks over to the piano, the brother then says, “Thank you, but we have no music.”
Beethoven, surprised, asks, “No music!-how then does the Fraulin play my sonata in F?” The
brother then moves his hand in front of his sister’s eyes and replies, “Blind--I entreat your
pardon.” The sister then asks, “You are Herr Beethoven?” Beethoven turns back to the piano and
tells his companion, “Snuff the candles and I will improvise for her, in the moonlight.”As
Beethoven begins playing, now without light (presumably to match his audience’s blindness), the
scene fades to black and a last phrase appears on the screen: “Thus Beethoven’s immortalized
sonata.”
In this film, Beethoven finds a soulmate in a blind woman, and one cannot help but
wonder if the disability role reversal is related to the fact that this film was made during
the silent film era when deaf audiences had a very different relationship to the movies.142
Aside from this reversal, the film reproduces the same strategy that would appear
in the much later films. In fact, it is not coincidental that the characters that pair up with
Beethoven are women, young boys, or very submissive men (Schindler). The Beauty and
the Beast scenario not only constructs disability by contrasting it with non-disability, but
it also introduces gender into the scenario. This becomes interesting when one compares
it to the relationship between gender and disability in the more typical film where the
main character is able-bodied. Davis explains that in general,
Films enforce the normal body, but through a rather strange process. The normal body, invented in
the nineteenth century as a departure from the ideal body, has shifted over to a new concept the
normal ideal. This normal ideal body is the one we see on screen. It is the commodified body of
the eroticized male or female star….These bodies are the modern equivalents of the nude Venuses,
142
Linda Williams offers a different, and compelling explanation: “In the classical narrative cinema, to see
is to desire. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the ‘good girl’ heroines of the silent screen were
often figuratively, or even literally, blind. Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire,
allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the
voyeur’s pleasure, with no danger that she will return that look and in so doing express desires of her own.”
See Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by
Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD.: University Publications of
American, 1984), 83.
98
and to keep them viable, to think on and obsess about them, the Medusa body has constantly to be
143
shown, reshown, placed, categorized, itemized, and anatomized.
One of the interesting aspects of Beethoven biopics is that these films, in
employing Beauty and the Beast scenarios, effectively eroticize the secondary characters
through their contrast with the Medusa character, Beethoven. This effect is perhaps most
notable in Immortal Beloved and most blatant in Copying Beethoven. However, the
eroticization of the able-bodied characters in all of the films, in a more subtle sense,
supports the idea that able-bodied characters are more vital, and more normal.
At the same time, the eroticization, or de-eroticization, of characters does not
occur only by placing one next to the other in a dramatic context. Much of it has to do
with the dominance and subservience of the roles played by the disabled and nondisabled characters. Paul Longmore has stated that the “maladjusted disabled person” is
the most prevalent image in film and especially in television since the 1980s. He also
explains that plots about these characters follow a consistent pattern of pairing the
disabled character with at least one non-disabled character:
The disabled central characters are bitter and self-pitying because, however long they have been
disabled, they have never adjusted to their handicaps, have never accepted themselves as they are.
Consequently, they treat nondisabled family and friends angrily and manipulatively. At first, the
nondisabled characters, feeling sorry for them, coddle them, but eventually they realize that in
order to help the disabled individuals adjust and cope they must “get tough.” The stories climax in
a confrontation scene in which a nondisabled character gives the disabled individual an emotional
“slap in the face” and tells the disabled person to stop feeling sorry for him or herself. Accepting
144
the rebuke, the disabled characters quit complaining and become well-adjusted adults.
The get-tough role of the non-disabled character is a common trope in Beethoven
biopics. At some point, Beethoven inevitably has a confrontation with one of the
secondary characters, and subsequently reverts to his “more gentle side.” For example, in
Copying Beethoven, Beethoven has several important confrontation scenes with Anna
143
144
Davis, 154.
Longmore, 137.
99
Holtz (perhaps the most pivotal being the one in the green room moments before
Beethoven was to conduct the premiere of the Ninth Symphony); in Immortal Beloved,
Isabella Rossellini’s Countess Erdödy and Schindler both confront Beethoven about his
treatment of his nephew.
The fifth strategy, the construction of Beethoven’s body as part-mechanical,
functions in much the same way as the emphases on death and decay and the references
to crude animalia; it portrays Beethoven’s body as imperfect, unwhole. In this case, it
does so by showing that Beethoven’s body must be supplemented by mechanical
prosthetics to regain wholeness. In Copying Beethoven, Anna Holtz’s first encounter with
Beethoven is a good example of the Beethoven-as-cyborg image.
Copying Beethoven shows more hearing aids on screen than any of the other
Beethoven biopics. Throughout the film, Beethoven frequently is seen wearing a metal
prosthetic of some kind, or with one near at hand. Beethoven Lives Upstairs also makes a
point to show Beethoven’s hearing aids prominently on screen; in one scene, Beethoven
talks about his hearing aids with the young boy Christoph. These hearing aids are more
props than the result of research into exactly what and how Beethoven heard. They
function as visual identifiers of disability much more than they give the audience any
sense of how Beethoven heard. A case in point: on Beethoven’s deathbed, he appears to
hear Anna Holtz’s speaking voice perfectly without the use of hearing aids, while at other
times he has great difficulty with his hearing.
The portrayal of Beethoven as cyborg does not only require props, however. One
of the earlier-discussed examples from Copying Beethoven, where his difficulties with
reading Anna Holtz’s lips result in frenetic camera zooms, can also be discussed in terms
100
of the construction of Beethoven as cyborg. The zooming camera is clearly meant to
represent Beethoven’s point-of-view, yet it is a vision that only a machine could
experience. The camera, in this example, has in a way become an implicit prosthetic to
his vision. In the previously-discussed scene from Un Grand Amour de Beethoven, we
not only see the construction of Beethoven as cyborg, but we can also hear it. The noise,
the sonification of Beethoven’s deafness, sounds clearly mechanical, and the mechanical
nature of the noise is emphasized by its synchronization with the windmill blades. In this
scene, Beethoven’s deafness is brought on by the involuntary awakening of the sound of
a machine inside his head. He has become a cyborg, even on the level of psychology.
Other films that similarly sonify the deaf soundworld all use sounds that are clearly
electronically-processed representations of the aural soundscape, giving the impression,
perhaps without the audience even realizing it, that Beethoven in his deafness is hearing
sounds that only a machine can generate. These moments where Beethoven seems to
become part machine serve to dehumanize Beethoven, and isolate from an able-bodied
perspective that is seen as whole, natural, and human.145
The sixth and final strategy is the use of disability drag, a term which refers to the
casting of able-bodied actors to portray characters with disabilities. The practice is
ubiquitous throughout the film industry to the point of being cliché; many actors have
made a name for themselves by portraying disabilities. Indeed, the practice has also been
fodder for humor; for example, in the Woody Allen film Melinda and Melinda (2004),
Will Ferrell plays a mediocre actor named Hobie who interprets all of his roles by doing
them with a limp. Although able-bodied actors have been portraying characters with
145
Although I do not have the space to do it here, a more in-depth discussion of Beethoven as cyborg
would of course engage with the work of Donna Haraway and other theorists.
101
disabilities since the early days of cinema, it is only recently that the practice has
acquired a name, in the work of disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers, who coined the
term “disability drag” in 2004.
Siebers outlines the functions of disability drag in the context of his essay on
disability as masquerade. Disabled people, he argues, often feel compelled to
masquerade, or play up their disability, in order to fit into a society of compulsory ablebodiedness. The more disabled one appears, he notes ironically, the less anxiety there is
on the part of people who consider themselves able-bodied, because their boundaries are
go unchallenged. “According to the logic of compulsory able-bodiedness, the more
visible the disability, the greater the chance that the disabled person will be repressed
from public view and forgotten.” However, disability masquerade can also be used by
disabled people for other purposes, including to gain attention for political causes. The
example he gives is the 1990 protest for the Americans with Disabilities Act, where three
dozen wheelchair users got out of their chairs and crawled up the steps to the Capitol
building amid a lot of media cameras. This of course, is an act that would not occur in
everyday life, but was a playing up of disability to make a point.
Siebers views disability drag as a subcategory of disability masquerade, even
though disability drag often involves able-bodied actors as the masqueraders, because it
is a particularly visible form of masquerade. “While there are certain people with
disabilities who embody the stigma of disability more visibly than others…the most
obvious markings of disability as a spoiled identity occur in the performances of ablebodied actors.”146 He goes on to say that “the modern cinema often puts the stigma of
disability on display, except that the films exhibit the stigma not to insiders by insiders,
146
Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Literature and Medicine 23, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), 17.
102
as is the usual case with drag, but to a general public that does not realize it is attending a
drag performance.”147 For Seibers, there is a positive and negative effect of disability
drag. The one advantage is that “it prompts audiences to embrace disability” in a way, by
mediating it through an able-bodied actor. This is of course one reason why Beethoven
films portray him as deaf, and then use hearing actors. Hearing actors are more accepted
in the film community, and there is the sense among the public that, given their lack of
disability, they would be able to do a better job.
This belief in the inherent superiority (and bankability) of able-bodied actors
recently manifested itself in the furor over the casting of Abigail Breslin as Helen Keller
in a Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker. Breslin was thirteen years old when it was
announced that she had been given the role, and Sharon Jensen, executive director for the
Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, an advocacy group for blind and deaf actors, released a
statement saying “We do not think it’s O.K. for reputable producers to cast this lead role
without seriously considering an actress from our community.” David Richenthal, the
lead producer of the show, responded by saying that his research did not turn up any
well-known actresses who were deaf or blind, and added,
It’s simply naïve to think that in this day and age, you’ll be able to sell tickets to a play revival
solely on the potential of the production to be a great show or on the potential of an unknown
actress to give a breakthrough performance. I would consider it financially irresponsible to
148
approach a major revival without making a serious effort to get a star.
The disadvantage of disability drag is that, according to Siebers, the actor can
usurp any attention that is paid to the disability. Not only that, but the actor can use the
disability to win greater attention from the public. This happens often, and when it does,
according to Siebers, it means that “disability appears as a façade overlaying able147
148
Ibid., 17.
Patrick Healy, “Group Criticizes Helen Keller Casting,” New York Times 30 Oct. 2009: C6.
103
bodiedness.”149 The audience’s perception of disability can be significantly altered in this
process; disability drag
not only keeps disability out of public view but it transforms its reality and its fundamental
characteristics…the audience perceives the disabled body as a sign of the acting abilities of the
performer…providing an exaggerated exhibition of people with disabilities but questioning both
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the existence and permanence of disability.
Given that cinema since its earliest days has used almost exclusively able-bodied actors,
this strategy, disability drag, should be seen as a fundamental strategy of cinema to alter
the public’s perception of disability.
It should be noted here that there were some variations in the use of disability
drag between early cinema and post-Jazz Singer cinema. Before talkies, disabled actors
were more often hired to play able-bodied characters, or at least disabled characters who,
usually thanks to an operation towards the end of the film, would be cured of their
disability. John Schuchman relates the particularly interesting instance of this in a film
called You’d Be Surprised (Paramount, 1926). One of the film’s cast members is
Granville Redmond, a deaf actor who was friends with Charlie Chaplin and appeared in a
number of Chaplin’s films. Redmond’s character in You’d Be Surprised is a deaf valet
whose presence is integral to the plot. In the film the deaf valet witnesses a murder, but in
a surprise ending, “the deaf valet turns out to be a hearing deputy coroner who feigned
deafness.” So here we have a deaf actor who has to play a hearing character who acts
deaf, then has to pass as hearing. “Finger spelling, some signs, and nearly every visual
stereotype of deafness are displayed in this film,” notes Schuchman, “even though
Redmond’s deafness was unknown to contemporary audience and film reviewers.”151
149
Siebers, 18.
Ibid., 18.
151
Schuchman, Hollywood Speaks, 112.
150
104
Talking pictures made it more difficult for disabled actors to pass as non-disabled
actors, and what few roles existed for disabled actors grew more scarce. What changed
more over time was the way disabled characters were portrayed on screen. Norden
divides the history of disability in cinema into three general historical eras. Films from
the beginning of cinema to the 1930s “gravitated toward the highly exploitative, with
their characters often not much more than comic stick-figures, freakish beasts, or pitiable
objects.” From the World War II era to the 1970s, films dealing with disability tended to
have “an exploratory quality, in which the characters’ disabilities and struggles to
overcome them take center stage.” From the 1970s to the present, more films appeared
that dealt with disability “in more of an incidental way, in which rehabilitation issues
often take a back seat to other concerns such as fighting for social justice, sexually
expressing one’s self, and simply getting on with daily life.”152
Norden categorizes the portrayals of disability in over six hundred films from
early cinema to the present according to what he calls “images,” or basic stereotypical
character types. These include the Obsessive Avenger, the Tragic Victim, the Saintly
Sage (who is almost always blind), the Noble Warrior, and others. Although he does not
look at any Beethoven biopics in his study, I feel that Beethoven typically is portrayed as
what Norden calls the Civilian Superstar, a “resourceful, adaptive, and courageous
individual who happens to have a disability.”153 To extend the definition of this type,
Norden cites a 1910 disability survey administrator who observed, “It is true that many
peace-time cripples have lived out their lives heroically and successfully and are holding
positions of responsibility.” Norden notes that all the disability images have come in and
152
153
Norden, 314.
Ibid., 51.
105
out of vogue, and the Civilian Superstar enjoyed popularity in films “from the late 1930s
to the 1950s and beyond.”154 In an extended exploration of this subject, it would be
interesting to look at a wider collection of Beethoven biopics, taking note of when they
were made and why. There seems to have been something of a revival as of late of
Beethoven dramatizations; these include Immortal Beloved, Copying Beethoven, and the
BBC Beethoven series, but also the BBC film Eroica: the Day That Changed Music
Forever (2003), the less dramatization-heavy In Search of Beethoven (2009), and two
plays, Hershey Felder’s Beethoven As I Knew Him (2008) and Moises Kaufman’s
Broadway show 33 Variations (2009).
In summary, the strategies I have outlined come up again and again in films to
isolate Beethoven from an audience that film defines as inherently able-bodied. They
create a fantasy of deafness that defines deafness as an Other and continually reinscribes
in the case of Beethoven a clichéd connection between pathology and genius—the notion
that only the tortured/misunderstood/even pathological figure can be a true genius.
Audiences are drawn to the opportunity to gaze voyeuristically on the disabled Beethoven
because films provide a similar experience to the freak shows of the nineteenth century—
they allow the public to construct normalcy by constructing disability.
Conclusions An awareness of the ways in which film isolates deafness and disability can
inform our approach not only to the films but also to the critical reception of these films.
Robynn Stillwell’s Beethoven Forum review of Copying Beethoven.155 Particularly
154
Ibid., 28.
Robynn J. Stillwell, “Scribal Error: Copying Beethoven and the Pitfalls of Perspective in Cinematic
Portraiture,” in Beethoven Forum 14/2 (Fall 2007), 197-204.
155
106
interesting in the review are the ways in which Stillwell’s criticisms and suggestions for
the film reproduce the cinematic strategies and biases that I have outlined. In her review,
it is clear that she is unaware of the existence of analytical frameworks for disability in
film, especially as explained by Martin Norden. The framework of the cinema of
isolation in fact predicts details of Stillwell’s review, and by examining the review in
light of these frameworks, it may help to crystallize how a critical perspective of
disability in Beethoven biopics can be relevant.
At the beginning of her review, Stillwell sets up the idea of a “figure” that is both
an individual and an “image.” Here, we see an argument forming that begins to
differentiate between the private experience of Beethoven and the public construction of
his identity:
Two clusters of terms hinge around the word “figure”—on the one hand, the individual, the
historical person who stands out from the ground of his or her time and place. These figures
become characters in the narrative of history, and often in dramatic representation. They exist,
develop, and unfold in linear time. But a “figure” is also a subject of a portrait, of a still image that
contains a compressed version of that linear, living figure…..Film seems an ideal medium for the
representation of musical figures because visual images can unfold through time along with music.
156
Narrative is a dramatic device that can, but need not, be engaged.
There are key differences here, however, between Stillwell’s two figures and the
difference between public identity and private experience. Stillwell’s opening two
sentences are actually contradictory, where she describes an individual figure that both
“stands out from the ground of his or her time and place” and this same figure that
becomes a character in the narrative of history that will “exist, develop, and unfold in
linear time.” On one hand, a figure who stands out from history may be one who is
attached to experiential time, a non-linear that is more true to the individual. But that is
not apparently what Stillwell means, because she instantly retreats into a description of an
156
Ibid., 197-198.
107
individual that follows the cinematic necessity of placing individuals within a linear
narrative. The fact that she fails to acknowledge fully the existence of experience (to
recall, what Davis calls in terms of disability “modality”) shows that she has normalized
the idea of fitting individuals into narratives, certainly within the context of cinema.
Stillwell then describes the second type of figure, an “image” that is a compressed
version of an individual figure. The idea of the image seems on the surface to echo the
idea of the socially constructed self, and yet there is a problem here as well. Stillwell says
that the image is a “compressed version of that linear, living figure,” and in this argument
she normalizes the relationship between the individual and identity. This relationship has
of course been greatly problematized by queer theory and disability theory as well. It is
important to recognize that identity and experience are not telescoped versions of one
another but exist in separate spheres. As I have argued, the “image” so often portrayed on
screen has little to do with the socially constructed identity of disability but tries to pin
stereotypes of disability onto narratives, in order to normalize these representations of
disability. This process is implicitly described here by Stillwell.
In the review, Stillwell immediately goes on to note that “the “biopic,” or filmic
biography, is a notoriously inaccurate genre, in large part because films tend to engage
with a narrow set of pre-packaged narrative tropes (rags-to-riches, overcoming a dramatic
setback, the talented artist who turns his/her back on high art for the “vulgarity” of
popular music—or vice versa—and wins over both sides).”157 What she neglects to
mention here is that, in the case of Beethoven biopics which are the focus of her review,
these few narrative tropes are directly related to the narrative strategies that Norden
describes in The Cinema of Isolation. The reason for the limited number of narrative
157
Ibid., 198.
108
tropes is that the films constantly reinscribe stereotypes of genius and disability in the
perpetual effort to give the audience an image of the “normal.” Similarly, Stillwell goes
on to defend biopics like Copying Beethoven, and Amadeus as well, arguing that “some
of the most egregious [historical] changes are meant for symbolic weight.”158 What is
being symbolized, and why, by these historical changes? What is missing is the
awareness that changes made for “symbolic weight” so often serve to marginalize
characters marked by disability and in Beethoven’s case genius, and that a system of
conventions circumscribe the ways in which these changes operate.
Stillwell reveals the biases of the cinema of isolation most clearly when she
recommends ways that Copying Beethoven could have been improved. Her
recommendations exactly reproduce the strategies that I have discussed for marginalizing
Beethoven as a disabled character. The biases in these “improvements” should speak for
themselves:
So, how might one have created a more original take on Beethoven? Even within the conventions
of “fanfic,” two more intriguing options present themselves almost immediately. The first is a
minor-character point-of-view (POV) fic—a peripheral character assumes center stage and tells
the familiar story from his or her perspective, limited in some ways but insightful in others. Karl
could have been a tremendously interesting narrator. That structure can lead to an eroticization of
the relationship that could be understandably disturbing; but as it is, the relationship between
Beethoven and his nephew is so sketchily drawn that an insidious tinge of pedophilia and incest
clings to the depiction within the film anyway.
The other, more challenging choice, but one that is made possible by the medium of sound film, is
an introspective Beethoven’s POV. We now know more about how he “heard” things; sound
design and cinematic technique could have given us a subjective impression of his experience of
those last days. The script wants to communicate this internal life, but it is expressed in such
heavy-handed lines as, “God whispers into some men’s ears; he shouts into mine, that’s why I’m
deaf,” or “Everyone thinks I live in silence. God infests my mind with music…then makes me
159
deaf.”
It is one of my central points that we know very little about how Beethoven heard
things, and Stillwell’s use of the word HEARD in quotation marks is just one indication
158
159
Ibid., 198.
Ibid., 203.
109
of the marginalization of deafness. There are two implicit assumptions in the use of these
quotation marks; the first is that deaf people hear in a way patently different than
“hearing” people. This idea is simply a projection of a socially constructed identity on to
deaf people rather than a description a biological fact. Hearing is continuum of
experience; no one hears normally or abnormally. For everyone, the process is the same:
vibrations in the air encounter the body, in the ear but over the whole body as well. How
we interpret those vibrations is a highly individual experience. The second assumption is
the common feeling among those who consider themselves non-disabled that with a little
research they can create a useful impression of the disabled experience. It is doubtful that
Stillwell would make a similar statement about using sound technology to portray a
hearing individual’s subjective “hearing.” This is an important insight in disability
studies. As Davis explains,
The first assumption that has to be countered in arguing for disability studies is that the “normal”
or “able” person is already fully up to speed on the subject. My experience is that while most
“normals” think they understand the issue of disability, they in fact do not. When it comes to
disability, “normal” people are quite willing to volunteer solutions, present anecdotes, recall from
a vast array of films instances they take for fact. No one would dare to make such a leap into
Heideggerian philosophy for example or the art of the Renaissance. But disability seems so
obvious—a missing limb, blindness, deafness. What could be simpler to understand? One simply
has to imagine the loss of the limb, the absent sense, and one is half-way there. Just the addition of
a liberal dose of sympathy and pity along with a generous acceptance of ramps and voice160
synthesized computers allows the average person to speak with knowledge on the subject.
In these recommendations, Stillwell suggests strangely that a peripheral character
assume center stage and tell Beethoven’s story, neglecting to mention that a clear use of
the Beauty and the Beast-type plot already exists in the film. Anna Holtz’s contrived
copyist is the peripheral character who serves the purpose Stillwell describes—in other
words, the able-bodied ‘narrator’ she prescribes already exists. What Stillwell does get
160
Davis, “Introduction,” in Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), xvi.
110
right is her acknowledgement that such a narrator does lead to an eroticization of the
relationship between Beethoven and this peripheral character. This eroticization, an
inherent part of a Beauty and the Beast scenario, is evident throughout the film. At
various times Beethoven moons Anna Holtz, then later asks her to wash him; the most
erotic moment in the film is where Anna Holtz conducts the Ninth Symphony with
Beethoven (a scene which the director has described as a love scene between the two
characters.) Stillwell at one point explicitly acknowledges this plot device, even using the
term, where she notes that with the pairing of a beautiful, blonde, young woman and a
“dirty, gruff, and socially unacceptable” composer, “the stage is set for a Beauty and the
Beast story, or at least a gender-bending anthropomorphized Androcles and the Lion.”161
What is missing here is the awareness of how this plot strategy has functioned countless
times in the history of cinema to shape images of disability.
Copying Beethoven’s particular variations on the themes that saturate Beethoven
biopics, and disability-focused films in general, more explicitly eroticize Beethoven than
other films. It is in this way that the film stands out from other Beethoven biopics, but
even in standing out, the film is really only exploiting a convention. As Stillwell
accurately observes, “the most interesting aspect of the film is exactly where it fails—it is
so utterly predictable where it wants to be daring and exciting.”162 A longer discussion of
the film (and of Stillwell’s review) than is possible here would explore the gender issues
that are highlighted in the film, and would discuss in more detail the relationship between
gender constructions and disability constructions in film.
161
162
Stillwell., 200.
Ibid., 199.
111
The tropes described by Norden in The Cinema of Isolation, and by other
disability studies scholars, help us to analyze how disability has been visually constructed
in film. Disability is far from a secondary issue in film, but is rather almost always
centrally positioned as a way of defining the norms of the film and by extension, the
norms of society. Film scholars and audiences alike have made this connection between
artistically defined norms and socially defined norms. One of the functions of disability
studies, and critical studies at large, is to reveal this connection and to show how it has
historically privileged some and oppressed others.
112
Conclusion
The image of Beethoven is continually formed and reformed in the public
consciousness. The most important mechanisms in this process—texts, music scores, and
films— have been visual only because we live in a vision-centered society. In different
ways, all of these media have been used to visually construct deafness since the late
eighteenth-century. Beethoven’s image as a deaf person begins with the Heiligenstadt
Testament, a document that speaks to the public and self-consciously constructs deafness
for that public. It panders to a hearing-normative society’s idea of the deaf person’s
isolation, and at the same time reflects Beethoven’s own anxieties about both his hearing
loss and his identity as a deaf person, given that his life was focused on a career that
relied heavily on assumption that hearing is normal, and in the Romantic sense, that
hearing is transcendent. Wagner’s centenary essay also visually constructs deafness, by
mapping out the inner landscape suddenly visible to Beethoven in a clarity only won by
his nature-given deafness. This mapping is most explicit in the program for the C# minor
quartet, a picture of transcendence and revelry that borrow more liberally from Berlioz
than from any familiarity with the deaf experience. This image also is tied to German
nationalist politics, and as I have argued, this politically charged image engages with the
public image of deafness in ways that have been neglected. Finally, in the medium of
film, we see the same visualization of Beethoven’s deafness occurring again and again.
Wagner exaggerated this visualization, and films continue to exaggerateis just one more
means of visually shaping deafness for a hearing-normative society, in order to both
“make it fit” and to use it, like any other disability, to justify the assumptions of what is
normal.
113
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