Meet Ludwig van Beethoven: The Letter He Never Sent

Heiligenstadt, 1802

He began losing his hearing in his late twenties — the cruellest possible affliction for a musician, and one he hid for years because he believed it would end his career. In the summer of 1802, staying in the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna, he wrote a long letter to his brothers Carl and Johann describing his isolation and his despair.

He never sent it. It was found among his papers after his death in 1827, and it is now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

What came after

Almost everything you know came after that letter. The Third Symphony, the Eroica, arrived within about two years and is long enough and strange enough that it effectively redefined what a symphony could be. The late string quartets and the Ninth Symphony were written when he was profoundly deaf.

At the Ninth's premiere in 1824 he was reportedly still conducting after the orchestra had stopped, and had to be turned around to see the audience applauding.

Conversation books

From around 1818, visitors wrote to him in notebooks so he could follow a conversation. Roughly 400 of these survive — an unusually direct record of a great composer's daily life, arguments, and irritations, in other people's handwriting.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when the thing you built your life around is being taken from you. He is not consoling about it — he wrote down exactly how bad it was — and he is the clearest case on record of continuing anyway.