The German composer who bridged the Classical and Romantic eras, producing nine symphonies, sixteen string quartets, thirty-two piano sonatas, and a body of work that reshaped what music was thought capable of expressing — and who, in going deaf at the height of his powers, became the defining emblem of the artist-genius creating in defiance of circumstance.
In 1802, Beethoven walked to a village outside Vienna and wrote a letter he never sent. He was thirty-one years old, already losing his hearing, and in that letter — addressed to his two brothers — he described his despair and his resolution. He had considered suicide, he wrote, and rejected it because of his art. There was more to give. He sealed the letter, hid it, and returned to Vienna to compose the Eroica Symphony, the Waldstein Sonata, the Appassionata, and eventually the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, and the late string quartets — works written when he could hear nothing outside his own head. The letter was found in his desk after his death, in 1827. It is called the Heiligenstadt Testament, and it sits at the center of everything people have wanted to believe about Beethoven: the solitary genius, suffering and creating beyond ordinary human limits. Whether that story is true, and what it costs to tell it, is the real subject of his afterlife.