Ludwig van Beethoven
1824
By 1824, Beethoven was completely deaf. Not 'couldn't hear soft sounds' deaf — stone deaf. He communicated through conversation books, writing back and forth with visitors like passing notes in class. He hadn't performed publicly in over a decade. He was fifty-three, sick, paranoid about money, embroiled in a vicious custody battle over his nephew Karl, and convinced that Vienna had forgotten him. Then he premiered the Ninth Symphony, and two thousand people lost their minds.
The premiere on May 7, 1824, at the Kärntnertortheater was conducted — technically — by Michael Umlauf, who had instructed the orchestra to ignore Beethoven entirely. Beethoven stood beside him, flailing his arms to a tempo only he could feel, several bars behind the actual music. When the final movement ended, the audience erupted. Beethoven kept conducting. The contralto Caroline Unger had to walk over and physically turn him around to face the crowd. He saw the standing ovation. He heard nothing.
The fourth movement breaks every rule of symphonic writing that existed in 1824. Beethoven introduces a baritone soloist who literally sings 'Oh friends, not these tones — let us sing something more pleasant and joyful,' rejecting the previous three movements of his own symphony. Then a full choir enters, singing Friedrich Schiller's 'Ode to Joy,' and the symphony transforms from an orchestral work into something between a concert and a religious experience. No one had ever put voices in a symphony before. Haydn didn't. Mozart didn't. Beethoven did it because he decided a symphony wasn't big enough to say what he needed to say.
The European Union adopted the Ode to Joy melody as its anthem. It was played when the Berlin Wall fell. It was performed at the opening of the Nagano Olympics. A deaf man's melody became the sound the world reaches for when it wants to express unity. I own a first edition of the score, and I still can't quite believe one human being wrote it. Especially one who couldn't hear it.