How Did Beethoven Hear Music?

[Music] most of you probably know this this is the ode to joy from the fourth movement of beethoven's ninth symphony it was begun in 1822 and completed in 1824 when beethoven was 54 years old this particular symphony critics and musicologists consider to be beethoven's greatest work and one of the supreme achievements in the history of music and i agree it's hard to believe that someone could write something this [Music] beautiful what's even harder to believe [Applause] [Music] is that he wrote it when he was completely deaf i've always wondered not only how someone could write a piece like this this vast this beautiful when they're deaf but also why how do we even know about beethoven's hearing loss or deafness he wrote a letter in 1802 called the heiligen testament to his two brothers carl and johann that wasn't discovered until after beethoven's death in 1827. let me read you a bit from that from childhood on my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill and i was even inclined to accomplish great things but to think that for six years now i've been hopelessly afflicted made worse by senseless physicians from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady though born with a fiery active temperament even susceptible to the diversions of society i was soon compelled to isolate myself to live alone if at times i tried to forget all this oh how harshly i was flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing yet it was impossible for me to say to people speak louder shout for i am deaf how could i possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others a sense which i once possessed in the highest perfection a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed then he goes on to say but what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and i heard nothing or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again i heard nothing such incidents drove me almost to despair a little more of that and i would have ended my life in 1802 beethoven was 32 years old so six years earlier at age 26 he began to lose his hearing so what did beethoven mean when he said a sense that i once possessed in the highest perfection a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed he's talking about having perfect pitch the only way that beethoven could have written music while he was deaf is if he had perfect pitch now what is perfect pitch perfect pitch is the ability to hear a note without a reference tone and know what it is it's also the ability to imagine in your mind a note or a series of notes or even an entire orchestral score and know what it sounds like if any of you have ever seen the movie amadeus that came out 1984 there's a scene near the end where the mozart character is really ill he's in bed and he's imagining his requiem as he's imagining it he's telling salieri the other character what pitches to write second beat of the fourth measure on f [Music] now the orchestra second bassoon and bass trombones with the bass that is a great demonstration of what perfect pitch is and this is something that beethoven had to the highest degree when i say the highest degree i'm not sure that there's anyone that has had a musical imagination or perfect pitch to the level of beethoven just think of him imagining this so in complete silence you have to imagine the entire orchestration of every single part just by looking at the page when beethoven began to lose his hearing it started from the top down meaning the higher frequencies began to disappear first if you think of the highest note of the piano c8 that is 4 186 hertz or roughly 4.2 k now human beings can hear from 20 to 20 000 hertz okay this is 4 186 hertz so to begin to lose your hearing at the top end i mean typically people when they get in their late 50s like myself their hearing will go down to probably about 13k right so you don't really hear things that well above that it's just gone that's from living long enough beethoven died at 56 okay so in his mid-20s his hearing was probably like that of someone that is 80 years old if you're having trouble hearing the highest notes of the piano that is very profound hearing loss let me give you an example of what that might sound like if beethoven was hearing one of his own pieces to try to approximate what beethoven's hearing loss would be what you need to do is know what range is affected by the articulation of speech typically people that have a deficiency between 2 and 4 k will have trouble hearing someone speaking to them because the articulation of speech is between that frequency range i'm going to use an eq in pro tools to filter out the top end to try and approximate what beethoven's hearing would be like especially if we get lower than the frequency of hearing intelligibility let's go over the computer okay starting to have it really affected there when i get down to about 2k [Music] i just brought the low pass filter down to 1.3 k let's try and do it a little bit more dramatically and see what happens and then in let's make it even more severe okay let's do it without it [Music] let's do it even more make it more severe [Music] in addition to high frequency hearing loss beethoven also suffered from tinnitus or tinnitus as some people say now i'm very familiar with it because i have tinnitus let me give you an example of what my tinnitus sounds like right now now turn your monitors down your volume down i'm just going to play two seconds of the sound just to give you a feel for what it sounds like here it is i don't have it every day but when i do have it like right now it's incredibly loud and it's hard to imagine doing anything with music if you have it all the time let me give you an example of what this frequency loss and tinnitus together would sound like to beethoven how do you even think of music in your head to write when you're hearing that sound so this is beethoven as if he's hearing an orchestra play his third symphony with his hearing diminished and with his ears ringing then think about being alone while you're writing this music and you're pounding it on the piano and you have that constant ringing going on so one of the things about beethoven's writing is that during this period as he began to lose his hearing in the high frequencies he had all these different devices that that he would use putting a pencil in his teeth and putting it on the on the sound board or putting his head down on the piano they have talked about him sawing the legs off his piano putting it on the floor to use the floor as a sounding board there's all these different things that he would do and play very loudly but his writing then started to get into a lower and lower ranges you can hear that during certain periods if you think of the moonlight sonata that i played earlier that's in a very low register and that's most likely because of him losing his hearing so he's not writing up in that high register because he can't hear in that high register well then a thing happened eventually around 1816 or so or maybe a little bit later he went completely deaf and then his writing actually opened up to where he was imagining everything in his head but he's even hearing that ringing going on as he's trying to imagine like we just saw the mozart character imagining music beethoven's imagining that music while that ringing is going on as well i can't even fathom that and then to think of the entire ninth symphony or the late beethoven string quartets what they sound like in beethoven's head [Music] that was part of string quartet number 13. in fact i have all the beethoven string quartets right here starting on the 12th these are all the pieces that beethoven wrote when he was deaf this is just a series of the string quartets think about all the other music he wrote at the end of his life none of this he could actually listen to and enjoy anywhere but in his own mind i can't even fathom that another thing to think about related to beethoven being able to hear this because of his perfect pitch and his unbelievable brain power and willpower people with perfect pitch tend to have their perfect pitch begin to drift a half step out of tune in their 50s now beethoven started on the ninth symphony when he was 52 and finished when he was 54. in my own case i don't have perfect pitch but i have really good pitch memory i could always tune my guitar up perfectly to e right the high e string low e string would be dead on with e until i got in my early 50s then i would tune it up when i changed strings and i thought oh i'm it's dead on and i checked with the tuner but it was dead on with e flat and most people with perfect pitch that i know when they hit their 50s it drifts by a half step and by the 60s it's gone completely now i have a theory that maybe beethoven was also like that right maybe the the ninth symphony sounded like this [Music] that's down a half step that's just a thought if you learn nothing else from this channel go check out just the last movement of beethoven's ninth symphony you don't have to listen to the entire symphony you don't have to listen to the string quartets although you should those late string quartets are unbelievably beautiful just go to the ninth symphony and listen to it for yourself you can find recordings right on youtube or spotify or apple music listen to it and imagine the kind of mind that it takes to not only imagine it in their own mind but also to be driven to write something that you can never listen to that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbeater.com follow me on instagram at rickbiota1 check out the new beatto ear training program at beautiertraining.com and if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks for watching you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 322,317

Rating: 4.9828839 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, Beethoven, Deaf, Classical Music, Piano, Mozart, Amadeus, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Symphony 9, Ode To Joy, Tinnitus, Hearing Loss, Perfect Pitch, Relative Pitch, Inspiring, music history, Composition, Beethoven String Quartets, Orchestra, Symphony, Moonlight Sonata, Composer, classical music, symphonic music, Absolute pitch, Piano sonata, beethoven biography, heiligenstadt testament beethoven

Id: 3bA2V0jZMo4

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020