Beethoven

This year we celebrate an important anniversary: 250 years since the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the world’s greatest composers. Beethoven (1770–1827) was a bridge between the classical era of Haydn and Mozart, and the romantic era of Schubert and Brahms. I know you’ve all heard the opening motif from his Fifth Symphony.

Recently, while stuck at home because of the coronavirus, I enrolled in “Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas” through Coursera. This class is taught by pianist Jonathan Biss. You can enroll free of charge and, as the old joke goes, it’s worth every penny. No, seriously, the course is outstanding; Biss gives a masterclass on how to appreciate Beethoven’s music and how to teach online (something many of us had to learn quickly when covid-19 shut down in-person classes in March). Biss’s analysis of the Appassionata (Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Opus 57) is particularly memorable.

Beethoven slowly lost his hearing as he grew older, and composed many of his later works (including his masterpiece the Ninth Symphony) when he was deaf. I wonder if he would have benefited from a cochlear implant? Russ Hobbie and I mention such auditory prostheses briefly in Chapter 13 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

The cochlear implant… [is] a way to use functional electrical stimulation to partially restore hearing. A row of electrodes is inserted along the cochleato stimulate the nerves that are usually excited by the hair cells. Some pitch perception can be restored by performing a Fourier analysis of a sound and stimulating neurons at different places along the cochlea.

Whether or not Beethoven would have been helped by such a device depends on why he went deaf. If he lost hair cells in the organ of Conti but had a healthy auditory nerve, then a cochlear implant would have been beneficial. If the auditory nerve itself was the problem, an implant would have been of no use. I don’t know what caused Beethoven’s deafness, and I’m not sure anyone does.

Beethoven’s later years were lonely, and an auditory prosthesis might have let him to interact more with people. However—and with all due respect to the heroic scientists and engineers who design and build cochlear implants—he probably would have been disappointed (no, horrified) when listening to music. For a virtuoso like Beethoven, I suspect he would rather hear the music in the privacy of his own thoughts than listen through an imperfect device. If only the cochlear implant had been invented 200 years earlier, Beethoven could have decided for himself.