By Lawrence Toppman

Most of us probably think Beethoven went deaf relatively early, then churned out masterpieces for decades without hearing a note. The 1994 film “Immortal Beloved” popularized that idea, and it seems as astonishing as a blind person climbing Mount Everest. (Two have done so, though the Nepalese government has now banned solo climbers and blind or severely disabled people to cut down on fatalities.)

But new evidence suggests Beethoven might have retained partial hearing up to a year before his death. A recent BBC Music Magazine article reports that Kent State University professor Theodore Albrecht has been translating 12 volumes of Beethoven’s conversation books, written notes passed to him when conversation became too difficult. Sometimes he spoke to visitors; sometimes he wrote back and kept his jottings after they left.

Scholars have long debated the cause of his deafness. “Immortal Beloved” attributes the first symptoms to a clout on the ear by his drunken father; that’s far-fetched, though Johann did beat his son when the boy disobeyed him. Lead in Beethoven’s blood seems likelier; merchants illegally added leaded sugar to sweeten cheap wines in the 18th century. Possibly diabetes and hepatitis contributed to it, or a recurrence of childhood smallpox. (He suffered ill health all his life.)

He tried many useless cures: medicines, bleeding, leeching, cold baths and lukewarm baths, even painful applications of tree bark to his body to absorb “healing” chemicals. His hearing started to fail at 27 and declined over his last three decades. Some writers believe he heard almost nothing as early as the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in 1808.

Yet he reportedly listened through an ear trumpet to his nephew playing a piano in 1820, when Beethoven was almost 50. Three years later, says Albrecht, he advised a man going deaf, “Do not use mechanical devices too early; by abstaining from them, I have fairly preserved my left ear.”

Albrecht thinks the composer could hear at least some of his Ninth Symphony at its premiere in May 1824 and may faintly have heard the last premiere he supervised, his String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat, in March 1826.

I’d like to think so. Beethoven’s life contained so much unhappiness – physical, romantic, familial, financial – that it cheers me to believe he could appreciate on some level the extraordinary music he gave us.

Pictured: Gary Oldman in Immortal Beloved; © by Columbia Pictures.

By Lawrence Toppman

We take tone poems in classical music for granted today. Think of lovers swooning and dying during Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” overture. Liszt composed 13 symphonic poems, including works that aurally describe Orpheus, Hamlet and Prometheus. Berlioz wrote the longest popular piece of program music when he depicted a witches’ sabbath, march to the scaffold and other settings in Symphonie Fantastique.

Mussorgsky summoned an art gallery full of paintings in “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The modern equivalents are film soundtracks, where John Williams can reinforce the flying chaos of a quidditch match or the horrors of an encounter with Voldemort in “Harry Potter” scores.

So where did this trend start? I’d say it began in 1808 with Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. (Guest conductor JoAnn Falletta was supposed to lead the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in performances April 3-5, with Wieniawski’s Second Violin Concerto and Kodaly’s “Dances of Galánta.” She may yet, as the CSO hopes to reschedule cancelled concerts.)

Baroque and Classical era composers portrayed nonmusical things before that, of course. Telemann recreated animal sounds in his “Cricket” symphony and “The Frogs” overture. Handel offered visions of biblical plagues – the buzzing flies work especially well – in the oratorio “Israel in Egypt.” Composers often used martial instruments and rhythms to convey military actions; Beethoven himself did that in “Wellington’s Victory,” his 1813 “battle symphony” for a concert benefiting Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau.

Yet all 45 minutes of his Pastoral Symphony reveal Beethoven’s impressions of nature. He loved to walk in the country, believing it helped alleviate his deafness. He titled the movements to carry the listener through an afternoon he’d have enjoyed, interrupted by tense moments but ending in joy: “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside,” “Scene by the brook,” “Merry gathering of country folk,” “Thunder; Storm,” “Shepherd’s song; Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm.” If you’ve seen “Fantasia,” with its centaurs and cupids and tipsy Bacchus, you know Disney’s abbreviated, cheesy interpretation.

Nobody before Beethoven had written so long a programmatic piece, one that depicted places and events in every note. The idea took a while to catch fire, but Mendelssohn produced his overture to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1826. (He finished an hour-long score in 1842.) Berlioz wrote Symphonie Fantastique in 1830 in five movements, as Beethoven had done in his Pastoral. The floodgates opened, and we’ve seen “pictures in music” ever since.