The Adult Hearing-Impaired

Abstract

‘My most precious gift, my hearing has deteriorated very much.’ So wrote Beethoven as a young man of 28. We might feel that as a composer he had a somewhat exaggerated view of the importance of hearing, but closer examination reveals that his judgement had less to do with music than with his role in society. His severe hearing loss did not prevent him from writing his magnificent Ninth Symphony with its inspiring chorale based on Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, but it did make him shun society and avoid the embarrassment of social intercourse. In his famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ he wrote:

O my fellow men, who consider me, or describe me as unfriendly, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me because you do not know the secret reason why I appear to you to be so. I have been forced to accept the prospect of a permanent infirmity. Though endowed with a passionate and lively temperament and even fond of the distractions offered by society, at an early age I was forced to seclude myself and live in solitude. I could not bring myself to say to people ‘Speak up, I am deaf’. For me there can be no relaxation in human society, no refined conversations, no mutual confidences. I must live like an outcast and creep into society only as often as sheer necessity demands.