Beethoven — He Wrote Joy With Ears That Could Not Hear

For a musician, hearing is life — and Ludwig van Beethoven began losing his in his late twenties. At thirty-one he wrote what is known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, a will engraved with the despair of a composer going deaf.

At that suicidal depth, he did not break his pen; after the testament came the Eroica and the run of masterpieces that rewrote music. Completely deaf in his final years, he wrote the Ninth Symphony — the Ode to Joy.

At its premiere, unable to hear the thunderous applause, he had to be turned around by a soloist to see the hall's rapture with his eyes. A man who could not hear wrote humanity's song of joy; from the very place of loss came the greatest work.

He assembled sound not in his ears but in his mind: when outer conditions fail, people sometimes strike inner veins. Whether a handicap becomes talent's grave or talent's mineshaft is decided not by the handicap but by the person.

What do you work for?