What does someone who is not a music lover actually know about Ludwig van Beethoven? Often not more than that he wrote the thing with the "Tatatatahhh!" At the beginning and the "Ode to Joy". And almost everyone knows that the great musician was completely deaf for many years, but still composed brilliantly.

The latter, however, if you believe the musicologist Theodore Albrecht from Kent State University in Ohio, USA, is a legend that can be refuted just in the year of his 250th birthday . And the proof of this can be found in the objects that were long considered to be proof of the deafness of the great musician: in Beethoven's "conversation books". Because these were the composer's most important tools in order to be able to "talk" to others at all.

Almost 15 years ago, Albrecht had set himself the task of finally translating them into English and then arranging and commenting on their content. A huge task that he tackled in 2007.

To do this, he had to read these booklets very carefully - and carefully. German Beethoven researchers have apparently not yet done the latter. Otherwise they would have noticed what Albrecht noticed now. There has been historical evidence of the composer’s deteriorating hearing since 1798. From 1816 there is evidence that Beethoven had started handwriting parts of his conversations with visitors.

Theodore Albrecht, musicologist at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. PHOTO: PROMO

Always a booklet with you

He carried a booklet from about 48 . Year of life (1818) almost always with you. And he used the notebooks at home when there was a visitor. On the blank pages of these notebooks, the composer's interlocutors then wrote down what they wanted to tell him, what they wanted to ask him. Beethoven then usually answered in spoken words.

The year 1818 is generally considered to be the year in which Beethoven had more or less permanently lost his hearing, i.e. had become practically completely deaf. Overall, these booklets are a source of information about the life of the composer that no other historical person has. After all, who is going to keep a written record of almost every conversation he or she has?

The notebooks were apparently so full of personal information that Beethoven's temporary private secretary Anton Schindler felt obliged after the death of the master to add something wrong in many of them himself and to make many disappear entirely. Of the probably around 400 copies, 139 have survived. Most of them are in the Berlin State Library, two in the Beethoven House in Bonn.

"... pretty much preserved my left ear"

"In 2010 I translated issue 28, which was completed in April 1823," says Albrecht Der Tagesspiegel. There is documented, among many other things, a chance acquaintance with someone who also had hearing problems. Beethoven was therefore forced to answer this man not this time with spoken words, but exceptionally wrote something himself in the notebook. There he advises, among other things, to be careful with hearing tubes.

According to Beethoven, these acoustic amplifiers only made things worse: "By abstaining, I pretty much got my left ear," says volume 28 in the composer's handwriting on sheets 41 and 42. Albrecht did not simply read about this supposedly insignificant passage, in which only an unknown contemporary "spoke" to the master, as evidently many before him. But he recognized their importance.

From now on he was attentive and so far found a total of 23 indications that Beethoven was very hard of hearing at least until shortly before his death, but not, as he always says, "completely deaf".

A scream, then joy

In addition to the positions in the conversation books, says Albrecht, other documents. The English conductor Sir George Smart, who visited Beethoven in Vienna in September 1825, noted in his diary that the master could still hear a little if someone shouted something near his left ear ("If you halloo quite close to his left ear ").

And there is a record of the doctor Gerhard von Breuning, probably dated about a year before Beethoven's death. There it is said that one of his little sisters once gave a scream at the table. Having heard that "made him (Beethoven) so happy that he laughed brightly and joyfully."

[Read here what traces Beethoven left in Berlin, which he visited in 1796. ]

Theodore Albrecht combines all these documents in a shortly appearing technical article, which is available as a manuscript to the Tagesspiegel. He will also present his results at the “Beethoven Perspectives” conference starting on Monday in Bonn .

Why only now, and from an American?

In fact, the fact that Beethoven was not completely deaf in all the years in which he was previously considered to be “completely deaf” had a lot of implications. For example, it would make plausible, at least in parts, how Beethoven was able to produce compositions of the highest quality almost until the end of his life, such as his 9th Symphony in 1824 - and in some cases even conducted it himself.

The facsimile of the score of the 9th symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. The original will be in the Berlin State Library ... PHOTO: MARCEL METTELSIEFEN / DPA

The latter, in particular, can hardly be explained otherwise. It would at least somewhat relativize the legend of the genius, who was endowed with supernatural abilities, who was able to do something like this against all science, in the year of his 250th birthday. In any case, says Albrecht, it comes from "people who didn't know him well and used the terms" completely deaf "or" pitch deaf "because they perceived him that way. 

Beethoven was severely restricted in his social life, says Albrecht. But his "actual technical ability to compose - for piano, string quartet or orchestra and from contrabassoon to piccolo - was not significantly impaired."

The news that Beethoven apparently could still hear at least a little over the years should prove to be quite a "tatatatahhh" within musicology. And that it comes from Ohio of all places, and not from Vienna, Bonn or Berlin, naturally raises a question: how embarrassing it is for German and German-speaking Beethoven research that fills the entire shelf wall, because of this crucial difference between the “total deaf ”legendary and not only“ very hard of hearing ”real Ludwig van Beethoven?