--- title: Ludwig van Beethoven: What He Did After He Went Deaf description: He was born 245 years ago, and the tragedy of his hearing loss still captivates music fans canonical: https://time.com/4152023/beethoven-birthday/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-12-17T04:55:39.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:56:49.061Z article:section: History og:title: Ludwig van Beethoven: What He Did After He Went Deaf og:description: He was born 245 years ago, and the tragedy of his hearing loss still captivates music fans og:url: https://time.com/4152023/beethoven-birthday/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta3e88ee5f5611bfa/698875ac0a4a22772e9c78a2/beethoven.jpeg?branch=production&width=546&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 546 og:image:height: 307 og:image:alt: Portrait bust of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), German composer and pianist. One of the most influential western composers whose music bridged the Classical and Romantic periods. Musician og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Ludwig van Beethoven: What He Did After He Went Deaf twitter:description: He was born 245 years ago, and the tragedy of his hearing loss still captivates music fans twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta3e88ee5f5611bfa/698875ac0a4a22772e9c78a2/beethoven.jpeg?branch=production&width=546&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here's What Beethoven Did When He Lost His Hearing > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions for Joshua Bell [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions for Joshua Bell](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/au5cfNs5.m3u8) (6:51)  _Published 2013-02-07. Violin impresario Joshua Bell talks to TIME about his music, his priceless 300-year-old Stradivarius violin and his gambling habit_  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Dec 17, 2015 4:55 AM UTC  Circa 1754: Portrait bust of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), German composer and pianist. Circa 1754: Portrait bust of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), German composer and pianist. UniversalImagesGroup / Getty Images  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Dec 17, 2015 4:55 AM UTC Even centuries later, there remains one big mystery about Ludwig van Beethoven’s life: When is his birthday? Though his [last words ](http://time.com/vault/issue/1927-04-04/page/23/)were well recorded when he died on Mar. 26, 1827, the other end of his life was much more obscure. The date of his birth is often supposed to be Dec. 16, 1770, and his baptism was on the following day—245 years ago Thursday. But there’s a lot we _do_ know about Beethoven, and one of the most commonly known facts is that, by the end of his life, the world’s most famous musical genius couldn’t hear his own work. Interest in Beethoven’s hearing loss has long captivated his fans, many of whom are fascinated by the tragic circumstances of a deaf composer and the ways Beethoven managed to keep working even after he completely lost his hearing by the time he was 45\. As TIME once [described](http://time.com/vault/issue/1933-08-21/page/40/) it, “by clenching a stick in his teeth, holding it against the keyboard of his piano, he could discern faint sounds.” He even introduced the world to what remains perhaps his most famous composition—the Ninth Symphony—well after deafness had overtaken him, an irony that produced one of the most poignant moments of his career, as TIME [noted](http://time.com/vault/issue/1932-05-09/page/18/) in 1932: --- > “” --- That appreciation did nothing to lift the melancholy that had settled on Beethoven by then. Though he would joke about his other ailments, his letters later revealed to the world that his hearing problems only left him depressed, isolated from society and afraid that he was being taken advantage of. “My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I have avoided all human society,” he once [wrote](http://time.com/vault/issue/1961-12-08/page/102/). “I seem a misanthrope and yet am far from being one.” Yet his hearing loss and the way he coped with it in daily life has helped preserve his story for the ages. Because he used a notebook to conduct conversations with friends, family and colleagues, the written records of those conversations could be maintained. The transcripts are often one-sided, as he would still respond to many questions verbally, but “they make clear what Beethoven was thinking about,” TIME [noted](http://time.com/vault/issue/1970-02-16/page/79/) when the ‘conversation notebooks’ were released in the 1970s, “and where he occasionally wrote in the books himself—usually for a comment that he did not want others in the room to overhear—the blunt style is unmistakable. Nephew Karl brings home a somewhat seedy friend, and Beethoven jots down: ‘I don’t like your choice of this friend at all. Poverty deserves sympathy, but not without exceptions.'” In the 1990s, a few American fans of his purchased a lock of Beethoven’s hair at an auction for the purpose of [examining](http://time.com/vault/issue/1996-06-10/page/71/) the medical data preserved within, hoping to find out once and for all whether his deafness was really, as had been long supposed, caused by use of mercury as treatment for syphilis. That lock of hair is kept at San José State University, and [as of 2000](http://www.sjsu.edu/beethoven/collections%5Fexhibit/beethoven%5Fhair/scientific%5Ftesting/testno2/press%5Fconference/index.html) no tell-tale mercury had been found. _Read more about Beethoven’s birthday:_ [You Have to Try This Google Doodle Honoring Ludwig van Beethoven](http://ti.me/1O6dmAl) **_Read an assessment of Beethoven on the 200th anniversary of his death, here in the TIME Vault:_** [200-Condlepower](http://time.com/vault/issue/1970-12-28/page/47/) ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Hi, I'm Belinda Luskum, I'm an editor at large with Time. I'm sitting here today with Violin Virtuoso Joshua Bell, who has just started a sorta a new career as a conductor with the Academy of St. Martin in the Field. Mr. Bell, welcome. Thanks, thanks. You've got your first conducting CD coming out. With the academy someone and what not and appeals how do you play and conduct at the same time? I sit in the first violin chair and I lead everything while I'm playing the first violin. So, it means sometimes I'm playing, sometimes I'm directing with the bow, sometimes it's just facial gestures. Is conducting like directing? It's very much like directing a film do. The conductor has the idea of how they want to pace the piece, how the emotions they want at every moment. And that's, it's maybe sounds easy, but it's, it's not. Another like directing tune that everybody who's a performer secretly thinks that they would be a great. This is true. Conductor. Like me. I've been playing for years. Concertos, playing with orchestras, watching conductors, and all along I'm thinking, I think I could, I could do that. I've been hearing these Beethoven symphonies my whole life and thinking, I want to hear it this way, you know? And someday I want to get up there and show my way of going it, and that's what I'm I'm getting to do. So, this violin, it's I think you paid somewhere between 2. 5 for million dollars, that violin the Gibson Stratavesour and its been stolen twice. Right Does it travel with its own security? Well, I can't give out My security secrets. Oh. [ LAUGH ] Then you'd have to kill me? [ LAUGH ] But it's been the best investment I've ever made financially, although I'll never see the, the profits from it, because I will die with this in my, in my head. You know, the only way I, anyone can really understand traveling around with a violin like this is that it's like a baby, which is completely priceless and it is delicate. But it's been around 300 years. Still, still has it's original varnish much of it and it will be around for hundreds of years after I'm gone. And it survived an instant of where it was stolen and covered in polish Well it does have a bit of intrigue of around this. It was notorious by then for having been stolen from right here in Carnegie Hall in New York. Eventually the theif. Confessed on his deathbed that he had stolen it. He was a violinist and he just played on it his whole life so covered in shoe polish to disguise it and then played on it his whole life. So it's it's kinda of a neat story. One cliche of musicians is that. When they're young they like to play really fast. Right. And then when they get older they learn to slow down. Is that, have you found that to be true of you? That's a little disconcerting when you've poured your heart and soul into a Brahm's Sonata and then you play a little flashy piece and afterward everybody comes back and says" I loved that That, that. [ INAUDIBLE ] Paganini piece. God, I was moved by this. Like, did you, I just poured my soul into the big piece before. [ LAUGH ] That. So you are known for sorta experimenting a little bit. I mean, you're a, your obviously a classical player and the, the classical canon is your first love. But you've worked with bluegrass musicians. You've worked with. Sting. You've worked with some Broadway people. Mm- hm. Is there something you haven't tried yet? I look at music as just being music. And, there's good music and bad music as far as I'm concerned. So, sometimes it takes me into bluegrass but, or because I met some amazing people like Edger Meyer and Sam Bush and Bellafleck, and people like that and they just took me into this world and I follow that path and then next week. or actually just recently they asked me to do a song with Scarlett Johansson for a film called Chasing Ice. Just a call out of the blue and I said why not and I didn't know she She sang, she's got a beautiful voice, and now that song is nominated for, for an Oscar. Six years ago, you did this interesting experiment where, which is, you know, such an internet meme now. I don't know what you're talking about. Yes, you do. No, no, really? [ LAUGH ] Where you, you basked in a Washington subway. Right, right. You did some difficult Bach pieces And nobody recognized you, hardly anybody stopped. One guy recognized you, few people stopped. Maybe this story's been told wrong. And a video was taken of it. And and that video, you know, keeps coming back. Yeah. Again and again. Are you sup, well I, have I got that story wrong? Sure, I mean the story itself was About ten pages in the Washington Post. Right. Right. I have mixed feelings about it. I, I, it's probably the thing I get asked about most. Which is like pouring your heart into the Brahms sonata. A little bit, a little bit. You know, I have done other things [ LAUGH ] besides. But you know what, someone comes backstage after a concert, after I've played the Tchaikovsky concerto and tells me, you know, I've never been to a classical concert But I read that article was intrigued and now I'm I'm, I'm a fan of classical music. I mean am that's, these are audience I want to reach. With family life. Fatherhood. How do you juggle it all Well I need balance. I need to get away from music, I'll take two days off in between concerts and then just fly to Las Vegas Forget about music. Are you a gambler? And I gamble a little bit. Yes, yes. And do you like the tables? What, I mean what? For me the adrenaline of performance, of performing is like an incredible high. And I think when you're used to having that high, you look for it in other things. So I've, I, I love you know, watching sports and that, and getting that excitemnet or Or going to a black jack table and risking you know, losing money. It's, it gets the adrenaline up so it's probably a little bit unhealthy but. Well as long as you, I mean you seem to be comfortable. [ LAUGH ] Violinists actually historically are notorious gamblers. Going back into Oh really? Yeah. Vaniasky and Paganini they all were know for having lost instru, lost their strataviarus is in gambling gambling games. What hand would It's somehow a lot of, it runs in the family. What hand would have to have to put the Gibson Strat down? You have to have a, would it have to be like a royal flush? It would have to be a royal flush. If you had not found the violin, or you know, music, if your parents had not been, you know, you said you had a fortunate childhood. Then. What, what would the alternative Josh Bell have done? When I was home, around New Years time, my sister brought out a tape that I hadn't heard for many years of my firs, my very first interview when I was seven years old. I was playing my debut with the Bloomington Symphony, Indi, in Indiana, playing Bach concerto and they interviewed me for a kids', kids', Radio station. And so my answer to that very same question. Say what do you want to be when you grow up, Detective or Scientist? Actually both things I could imagine myself doing even to this day. I love puzzles. I love figuring things out. Josh Bell thank you very much. 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