Amerika

by Eric Castles

Welcome to the crepitant groans of the collapse. You think some people suffer during this time and most would agree they do. However, imagine this situation: you are one of the most gifted composers in history but God or nature has allowed you to become stone deaf.

What a tragedy? Maybe a comedy? Depending on how you view hardship, a special few ignore the reality of disability and push towards that which is higher; towards art and permanence. Towards beauty.

Okay, picture this. It is eighteen twenty-four. Vienna is a muddy city with horses clopping everywhere, and this grumpy old guy named Ludwig van Beethoven — he’s fifty-four — sits at a desk lit by one wobbly candle.

He cannot hear a thing. Zilch. Not the wind, not his own cough, nothing. Still, he scribbles music down.

Not any music but the third part of his Ninth Symphony. That big one they play at Christmas.

The third bit is quiet, like when you sneak downstairs at night and everything feels bigger. Violins start soft, cellos roll in like warm bread, horns go oompah but gentle. Thirty minutes of hug-music.

He wrote it after he had gone stone-deaf, after doctors gave up and his brothers teased him like jerks because back then deaf meant weak, un-manly.

Ludwig hated that nonsense. He even wrote a letter — a real one, folks still keep it — saying if he did not have songs trapped inside his head, he would have jumped in the river. But he stayed.

Why? Because inside that hairy, yelling shell lived this soft kid who felt everything twice as hard. No ears? Fine. He listened with his skin, with the thump in his ribs. When the Ninth got played for real — May seven, eighteen twenty-four — he stood up front waving his arms like a crazy windmill.

Orchestra followed, then his buddy tugged his sleeve: done. Beethoven bowed to empty air, thinking maybe it flopped. Crowd behind him screamed so loud the chandeliers shook. He never heard it.

Never once heard those strings cry, those horns glow. Yet every note hit perfectly, because genius isn’t sound; it’s knowing what should be.

That is the trick: deafness did not stop him, it sharpened him. Like how you draw better when the lights go out; you see lines anyway. The third movement is the proof and the expiation.

No fireworks. Just slow water, warm blankets, somebody whispering “you’re okay.” I like to think, late at night, Ludwig pressed his face to the keys, felt the wood buzz, and smiled. Not because he heard, but because he finally let go.

Music slipped out the cracks silence made. And we — two centuries later — still catch it.

Tags: art, beauty, ludwig van beethoven