The Music of Silence

It was the evening of the work’s premier performance. The symphony was very well received, but it was after the second movement had concluded that something remarkable happened. The audience burst into spontaneous cheering and applause, shouting for an immediate encore. But the conductor on his podium did not react.

An assistant walked onto the stage and carefully turned the conductor around so that he at last could see the ecstatic reaction of his audience. The concert was given on the 8th of December 1813 for an audience of Austro-Bavarian war veterans who had fought the retreating army of Napoleon just five weeks earlier, and Ludwig van Beethoven, who was both the composer of the symphony and its conductor at this special concert performance, was by this time almost totally deaf.

The wishes of the audience were made clear to him, and Beethoven immediately launched into the movement’s requested encore, with the orchestra dutifully and beamingly obliging. Even today, over two centuries after these events, the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, the allegretto, seems to have a special power to stir the souls of those who hear it, and Beethoven himself felt that it was one of his finest works.

What we are left to reflect upon is the vision of someone who, through his human will to create, overcame what must surely be the greatest setback for any composer: his loss of hearing. Others have done as much. The great Italian Renaissance artist Titian battled increasing blindness to continue painting, and the American author Helen Keller worked through her own dual handicaps of being both deaf and blind to continue her prolific and successful writing career, and so communicate to others what her creativity required of her.

We all are the children of divine spirits who move with us along our life’s path, even though that path might at first appear to be one which we would not have chosen for ourselves. But our spirits are always there, and all which they ask of us is to trust them, and to know, even in the face of what might seem to us to be ‘unfair’ odds, that we will be given the courage to do that which is required of us. And there always is the music of a blessed musical genius to give us both strength and solace. 

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven, created in 1820 by Joseph Karl Stieler, court artist to the Bavarian kings.