The man passed a shepherd into the woods. The shepherd was singing, but the man could not hear him.
The man walked past a stream where village women were washing their laundry. He saw they were laughing and talking, but he heard nothing.
He passed friends, who waved and spoke to him. Forcing himself to smile, he waved back. But he could not make out their words of greeting.
The man was turning deaf. A disease was robbing him of hearing. No doctor could help.
With heavy lines of sorrow on his face the man returned to the house in the village near Vienna, Austria, where he was staying. He went to the window of his room and looked out on the lonely scene: fields, the Danube river, mountains on the horizon.
It was a world without sound.
Tears welled up in his eyes. "Why me?" he shouted, pounding the wall with his fist.
He was a composer, a man to whom music was everything. A deaf composer! It seemed as cruel, as absurd, as a blind painter or a voiceless singer.
"Enough!" he shouted. "I will suffer no more. I'll end my life!"
But just then, he heard a gentle inner voice that whispered to him, "Ludwig, the Lord knows what he does. Perhaps he has taken away your hearing so you could hear other sounds, more magnificent than any known to man."
And indeed such sounds began to well up deep inside him. "I hear!" he shouted in triumph. "I hear!"
He dropped into a chair, dipped his pen into ink, and poured out his feelings in a letter to his brothers.
"Oh, you men who think or say that I am malevolent or stubborn," he wrote, "how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause that makes me seem that way to you... For six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted...finally forced to face the prospect of a lasting malady...What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, of someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair. A little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back."
He wrote on and on, then signed his name - Ludwig van Beethoven - and recorded the place and date: Heiligenstadt, October 10, 1802. The so - called Heiligenstadt Testament has been preserved as a document of history.
But those sounds within him - sounds that only he could hear - were rising even higher. He seized another piece of paper and started frantically scribbling notes. A mighty piece of music was emerging.
Born into a musical family in Bonn, Germany, in 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven composed much of his huge musical output when he was already deaf. His music spans all emotions from joy to despair, from tenderness to resolve. It glorifies man's freedom and dignity and the power of his will. It is loved all over the world.
Among his last and greatest works was the Ninth Symphony, in which the music of instruments and voices is blended in a way never attempted before. Listening to the first movement, one has the feeling of witnessing the creation of the world out of chaos. The last movement contains the famous 'Ode to Joy'.
In 1824 a huge, distinguished audience crowded the theatre in Vienna where the Ninth Symphony was first performed. When it ended, there was frantic applause. But Beethoven, by then completely deaf, had his back to the audience and so was not aware of it. Only when a performer pulled his sleeve and made him turn round did he realize what a triumph he had achieved. Gratefully, he bowed.
Three years later, in 1827, he died.
Had Beethoven yielded to despair and taken his life years earlier, his music would not be ours to enjoy and to be moved by until the end of time.
Story by Alexander Kucherov
