6 ms·

Researchers find high levels of lead, mercury and arsenic in Beethoven's hair

142 points by thm 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago
>“This man created some of the most beautiful music humanity was able to produce,” Rifai adds. “It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created.” I wonder if his deafness helped him create that music.
- lioeters 2y ago
  I'm sure that he heard his majestic music in his head as he was composing it.
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    He still felt it
  - recursive 2y ago
    Me too, but that's a fundamentally different experience. I think the question stands, and I'm interested in the answer.
    - HEmanZ 2y ago
      People debate endlessly about what effect it had on his music, and we’ll never know the counter factual. A few things about this that the majority of people don’t know tho: 1. He was wildly successful before he started going deaf. Like performing for and requested by the kings and emperors all around Europe successful. Like graduating from being apprenticed by Hayden successful. 2. He had played and composed a truly insane amount before losing his hearing. As a modern analogy, his father “Tiger Woods”ed him. He had all-day and all-night kind of regime from the time he 4 years old. He had famous teachers and was forced to perform in front of the nobility starting at the age of 6. He was pulled out of school as soon as possible to spend all of his time playing. His life was music, in a way very few humans ever experience anything. 3. Classical music is structured in a way that, it is not uncommon for composers to put the whole piece together on paper before hearing it. In composition exercises, pieces are critiqued without them being played. Exercises even at the highest level don’t need to be played to be judged. Pieces are often submitted and judged without anyone hearing them. It can be hard for someone not used to classical music to understand this.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    there are people without an inner monologue, that little voice inside your head. If you don't have that voice then i wonder if you can imagine or hear music inside your head like you would "that little voice". edit: here's a old article about people who lack an inner monologue https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...
    - genman 2y ago
      Yes, there are people who can hear music in their head but it is necessary not related to having the inner monologue.
    - darby_eight 2y ago
      TBH I never thought to even call the speech processing in my a head a "little voice" until someone accused me of not having an inner monologue. I don't perceive it as audio at all unless I put effort into it. Meanwhile music plays in my head constantly, so I don't think they're related.
      - suslik 2y ago
        I'm exactly the same; I also don't have anything 'visual' in my head at all - no images, shapes, or similar - only words, or music.
- lukan 2y ago
  "I wonder if his deafness helped him create that music. " Since he already composed great music before he became deaf, I think no.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  Possibly. You can often tell when a piece was composed based on how much he uses the low octaves. Some of his lower pitched works are because he could still hear those notes well. You can notice this in his 7th symphony for example. https://youtu.be/Qu_kAWCKSo8?si=swCapaFJM9CwYwWV https://youtu.be/Qu_kAWCKSo8?si=swCapaFJM9CwYwWV This movement is incredible because it’s so simple. It’s basically beginner piano. And yet it’s overflowing with emotion.
throwup238 2y ago
All great artists are a little bit crazy. Heavy metal poisoning is a clever shortcut.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> One had 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair, while the other had 258 micrograms. For reference, a normal level of lead in a gram of hair is around 4 micrograms or less. His hair also had 13 times the normal level of arsenic, and four times the normal level of mercury. What is "normal"? Normal for now, or normal for the 17th century? Looking at the hair and makeup regimes of the wealthy, they were all probably soaked in poisons. Arsenic seems more common than garlic, lead used more liberally than salt. If we apply modern standards for poisons, nobody should have survived those times.
- rovr138 2y ago
  I mean, did anyone survive those times?
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    Most people certainly didn't live as long. I can also imagine that a lot of people had lower IQ due to lead exposure.
dukeofdoom 2y ago
Just curious how do modern humans compare. I think most people have this notion that sewage treatment removes everything. I know the local creek that the local water treatment plant empties out into, and the creek smells like sewage. The water intake is maybe km away down river. Aside from obvious chemicals like paint that people might flush. All kinds of medical/drug chemicals they're on are also peed out as well. And those can be active in tiny amounts.
- rovr138 2y ago
  > Researchers tested two authenticated locks of Beethoven’s hair. One had 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair, while the other had 258 micrograms. For reference, a normal level of lead in a gram of hair is around 4 micrograms or less. His hair also had 13 times the normal level of arsenic, and four times the normal level of mercury.
- elevaet 2y ago
  I think we tend to have a lot less heavy metal poisoning in general than we did at different times in the past. It's only fairly recently that we realized how dangerous these metals are and started removing them from things like plumbing (that word comes from french/latin for lead), fuels, paints, even eating-wares. I think north america was using leaded gasoline up until the end of the 70s or so.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    At least until the mid-late 80's. My roommate had a 71 Dodge Challenger and it was only around '89 or so that it became harder for him to find the leaded gas it needed in the NYC area.
  - windowsrookie 2y ago
    And small engined airplanes still use leaded fuel.
- bananenpubs 2y ago
  [dead]
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
“ the slew of other health problems he suffered, including diarrhea and abdominal cramps.” So no different than the average consumer-society sedentary person. Just let poor old Beethoven rest in peace.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Chuck Berry sez, "Roll Over Beethoven" !
- brailsafe 2y ago
  People have a way of forgetting that everybody poops. Famous people have the same human deficiencies as any other, but if anything talent probably intensifies those issues through relentless focus on greatness or money to the point of complete neglect of yourself. Bill Gates is super sus, rich, and powerful, but he must feel like hell every time he wakes up or bends down.
amatecha 2y ago
"It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created." He couldn't physically hear the performance of it, but it's possible he could "hear" what it would sound like - and he very possibly heard it in his head before writing a single note down on paper (or however he recorded his music). I'm not sure everyone has this ability, but whenever I've written/recorded music, I almost literally hear it before I even try to create it or play it. My memory of sound is REALLY strong. I've never had someone go "oh yeah, me too!" when I discuss this though, so I have no idea if it's a common thing or what. It's like borderline hallucination, the clarity with which I can recall music and sound. I would wager that a lot of composers over the years have had this ability, especially since you couldn't exaclty spin up an orchestra in your livingroom while composing an operatic piece in 1800 :)
- gramie 2y ago
  My son is a composer, and he told me that he doesn't even need a keyboard any more, when he composes (he composes on paper, then transfers it to music notation software when it's ready to distribute). He also, sometimes, has a photographic memory for music. In university he had a listening test on a piece of classical music. He was able to visualize the score that he had studied when in high school, and identify the types and numbers of instruments.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Nice, that's great! People who compose complex, lengthy pieces always impress me. It's such a cool skill, and there's something so transcendental about it, somehow.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    It’s probably like writing. Writing by hand to avoid distractions then import into editing software
    - solumunus 2y ago
      Well yes, but doing that with writing requires no special ability. If you can’t generate music accurately in your head then this simply wouldn’t be an option for you.
w-m 2y ago
I'm quite confused. I learned 20+ years ago that lead poisining from the wine was the cause, or at least the suspected cause of Beethovens deafness. It's great that they found lead in his hair (again?), but thoroughly weird that they don't mention that it was the go-to theory already. On a large tangent, I tried asking GPT-4o to check the article whether it mentions that previously that theory already existed (could have overlooked it). GPT-4o confidently made up a complete quote from the article, then doubled down after I said I couldn't find the quote, and finally reversed its opinion 180 degrees. It's of course much too early to tell, but my feeling from a handful queries has been that GPT-4o hallucinates quite a bit more than GPT-4.
- deepakg 2y ago
  Indeed! There was even a book on the topic I read years ago. Lead poisoning seemed quite conclusive even back then. https://www.amazon.com/Beethovens-Hair-Extraordinary-Historical-Scientific/dp/076790351X https://www.amazon.com/Beethovens-Hair-Extraordinary-Histori...
- prvc 2y ago
  That particular sample was shown to have been a fake last year when multiple purported hair samples were compared.
- cranberryturkey 2y ago
  I spent the last 20 hours using 4o writing a tauri/rust desktop app. I don't know rust, so it was a LOT of pasting errors back in copying back to my code. But I'd say after about 14 hours it got very lazy. Does AI get tired like humans?
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Tell it you will give it tips for kWhrs.
  - efields 2y ago
    Sounds productive. Don't forget to take breaks, drink water, and sleep.
jorgesborges 2y ago
Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers that he never sent but it’s often referred to as a suicide note. It’s interesting — apparently he hid his bad hearing for a long time and considered it a humiliation. From the letter it also sounds like he was a real dick to people around him as a result, but they weren’t aware. So it serves as a sort of confession, apology and goodbye. You can read it here it’s pretty short. https://nac-cna.ca/en/stories/story/beethovens-complete-heiligenstadt-testament https://nac-cna.ca/en/stories/story/beethovens-complete-heil...
- lioeters 2y ago
  That is heart-breaking, and will probably make me cry the next time I listen to his music.
- busymom0 2y ago
  Any reason why there's no periods in it?
- lqet 2y ago
  Beethoven surely was an interesting character. He often had trouble finding apartments because he was such a difficult neighbor (and it didn't help that he played his piano as loud as possible, so that he could hear it). One time, he was arrested because he was creeping around Wiener Neustadt at night, dressed like a beggar, and peeping into living rooms. Nobody believed he was the famous composer, and a local organist had to be brought in to identify Beethoven. He also fought a long violent legal battle for custody of his nephew Karl after the death of his brother (Beethoven hated his sister-in-law) which lead to a suicide attempt of Karl, and the break-off of all contact. His sister-in-law in turn told the authorities that the "van" in Beethovens surname had nothing to do with nobility (as he seemingly had claimed), but was just a normal surname in in the Flemish region of his ancestors. What I also find highly fascinating are the entries in his conversation books which document how relatives tried to teach him basic math. It's strange to see that one of greatest composers in human history was unable to grasp multiplication or division.
  - cdelsolar 2y ago
jtc331 2y ago
How does one conclude from genetics that he had hepatitis B? Similarly how can you rule out IBS from his DNA when it can be caused by e.g. specific bacteria in the gut?
- throwup238 2y ago
  > How does one conclude from genetics that he had hepatitis B? Hepatitis B uses reverse transcription as a part of its lifecycle like a retrovirus, leaving some genetic markers in the host.
gymbeaux 2y ago
So why is his music considered “classical” and not “heavy metal”?
- rossant 2y ago
  That's a good one.
- eviks 2y ago
  It's too old, so all the metal has been eaten by rust
rompic 2y ago
There's a very interesting German (Austrian) podcast episode about this here: https://www.falter.at/podcasts/gerichtsmedizin/20221202/klenk-reiter-folge-9-der-raetselhafte-tod-beethovens https://www.falter.at/podcasts/gerichtsmedizin/20221202/klen...
- leobg 2y ago
  That was great. No chronic lead poisoning after all. Lead poisoning started only within ~100 days before his death, mostly caused by medical interventions (lead based antiseptic, lead based medicine) when he was treated for symptoms of an undiagnosed hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.
rob74 2y ago
> We have analyzed the hair of lead smelter workers and found there is too much contamination, unable to be removed from washing, to be able to infer blood lead concentrations Well yeah, lead smelters probably have a higher lead concentration in their hair than in their blood. However, if you ingest the lead and it shows up in your hair, it's probably safe to say that the blood concentration must have been pretty high (although it's not possible to infer the exact number of course).
Log_out_ 2y ago
Freude schöner götterfunken .. The berstein berlin concerts
jgalt212 2y ago
> Researchers tested two authenticated locks of Beethoven’s hair. How many authenticated locks are known to exist?
lostemptations5 2y ago
There are a number of people commenting about how Beethoven could hear music in his head, being deaf, and thus compose entire symphonies. But at that time the musical instruments of the day were incredibly "standardized". Basically it was all orchestral instruments such as violins, percuasion, and all the usual fair -- and by the time Beethoven went deaf he was intimately familiar with these such that he could IMAGINE it all in his head. Even if you went deaf tomorrow, in 20 years time you would still be able to imagine a violin -- it is a very distinctive instrument. So I think this feat -- while wonderful-- is pretty explainable.
- flappyeagle 2y ago
  I don’t think they’re astonished by his ability to imagine instruments. They are more remarking that he is considered the gold standard of music composition and he couldn’t hear what he was writing. Most artists still need the feedback loop of do something, evaluate it, iterate.
  - lostemptations5 2y ago
    Ok fair enough. Put that way it makes sense.
AlbertCory 2y ago
I think this was in Immortal Beloved (do I have the details right?). So touching. At the premier of his 9th Symphony, he was off to the side of the "real" conductor, waving his baton while the orchestra ignored him. When it stopped, the audience went wild. The contralto gently turned him around so he could SEE the ovation, being unable to hear it.

142 points by thm 2y ago

>“This man created some of the most beautiful music humanity was able to produce,” Rifai adds. “It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created.” I wonder if his deafness helped him create that music.

lioeters 2y ago
I'm sure that he heard his majestic music in his head as he was composing it.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  He still felt it
- recursive 2y ago
  Me too, but that's a fundamentally different experience. I think the question stands, and I'm interested in the answer.
  - HEmanZ 2y ago
    People debate endlessly about what effect it had on his music, and we’ll never know the counter factual. A few things about this that the majority of people don’t know tho: 1. He was wildly successful before he started going deaf. Like performing for and requested by the kings and emperors all around Europe successful. Like graduating from being apprenticed by Hayden successful. 2. He had played and composed a truly insane amount before losing his hearing. As a modern analogy, his father “Tiger Woods”ed him. He had all-day and all-night kind of regime from the time he 4 years old. He had famous teachers and was forced to perform in front of the nobility starting at the age of 6. He was pulled out of school as soon as possible to spend all of his time playing. His life was music, in a way very few humans ever experience anything. 3. Classical music is structured in a way that, it is not uncommon for composers to put the whole piece together on paper before hearing it. In composition exercises, pieces are critiqued without them being played. Exercises even at the highest level don’t need to be played to be judged. Pieces are often submitted and judged without anyone hearing them. It can be hard for someone not used to classical music to understand this.
- chasd00 2y ago
  there are people without an inner monologue, that little voice inside your head. If you don't have that voice then i wonder if you can imagine or hear music inside your head like you would "that little voice". edit: here's a old article about people who lack an inner monologue https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...
  - genman 2y ago
    Yes, there are people who can hear music in their head but it is necessary not related to having the inner monologue.
  - darby_eight 2y ago
    TBH I never thought to even call the speech processing in my a head a "little voice" until someone accused me of not having an inner monologue. I don't perceive it as audio at all unless I put effort into it. Meanwhile music plays in my head constantly, so I don't think they're related.
    - suslik 2y ago
      I'm exactly the same; I also don't have anything 'visual' in my head at all - no images, shapes, or similar - only words, or music.
lukan 2y ago
"I wonder if his deafness helped him create that music. " Since he already composed great music before he became deaf, I think no.
Waterluvian 2y ago
Possibly. You can often tell when a piece was composed based on how much he uses the low octaves. Some of his lower pitched works are because he could still hear those notes well. You can notice this in his 7th symphony for example. https://youtu.be/Qu_kAWCKSo8?si=swCapaFJM9CwYwWV https://youtu.be/Qu_kAWCKSo8?si=swCapaFJM9CwYwWV This movement is incredible because it’s so simple. It’s basically beginner piano. And yet it’s overflowing with emotion.

throwup238 2y ago

All great artists are a little bit crazy. Heavy metal poisoning is a clever shortcut.

sandworm101 2y ago

>> One had 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair, while the other had 258 micrograms. For reference, a normal level of lead in a gram of hair is around 4 micrograms or less. His hair also had 13 times the normal level of arsenic, and four times the normal level of mercury. What is "normal"? Normal for now, or normal for the 17th century? Looking at the hair and makeup regimes of the wealthy, they were all probably soaked in poisons. Arsenic seems more common than garlic, lead used more liberally than salt. If we apply modern standards for poisons, nobody should have survived those times.

rovr138 2y ago
I mean, did anyone survive those times?
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  Most people certainly didn't live as long. I can also imagine that a lot of people had lower IQ due to lead exposure.

dukeofdoom 2y ago

Just curious how do modern humans compare. I think most people have this notion that sewage treatment removes everything. I know the local creek that the local water treatment plant empties out into, and the creek smells like sewage. The water intake is maybe km away down river. Aside from obvious chemicals like paint that people might flush. All kinds of medical/drug chemicals they're on are also peed out as well. And those can be active in tiny amounts.

rovr138 2y ago
> Researchers tested two authenticated locks of Beethoven’s hair. One had 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair, while the other had 258 micrograms. For reference, a normal level of lead in a gram of hair is around 4 micrograms or less. His hair also had 13 times the normal level of arsenic, and four times the normal level of mercury.
elevaet 2y ago
I think we tend to have a lot less heavy metal poisoning in general than we did at different times in the past. It's only fairly recently that we realized how dangerous these metals are and started removing them from things like plumbing (that word comes from french/latin for lead), fuels, paints, even eating-wares. I think north america was using leaded gasoline up until the end of the 70s or so.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  At least until the mid-late 80's. My roommate had a 71 Dodge Challenger and it was only around '89 or so that it became harder for him to find the leaded gas it needed in the NYC area.
- windowsrookie 2y ago
  And small engined airplanes still use leaded fuel.
bananenpubs 2y ago
[dead]

loloquwowndueo 2y ago

“ the slew of other health problems he suffered, including diarrhea and abdominal cramps.” So no different than the average consumer-society sedentary person. Just let poor old Beethoven rest in peace.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
Chuck Berry sez, "Roll Over Beethoven" !
brailsafe 2y ago
People have a way of forgetting that everybody poops. Famous people have the same human deficiencies as any other, but if anything talent probably intensifies those issues through relentless focus on greatness or money to the point of complete neglect of yourself. Bill Gates is super sus, rich, and powerful, but he must feel like hell every time he wakes up or bends down.

amatecha 2y ago

"It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created." He couldn't physically hear the performance of it, but it's possible he could "hear" what it would sound like - and he very possibly heard it in his head before writing a single note down on paper (or however he recorded his music). I'm not sure everyone has this ability, but whenever I've written/recorded music, I almost literally hear it before I even try to create it or play it. My memory of sound is REALLY strong. I've never had someone go "oh yeah, me too!" when I discuss this though, so I have no idea if it's a common thing or what. It's like borderline hallucination, the clarity with which I can recall music and sound. I would wager that a lot of composers over the years have had this ability, especially since you couldn't exaclty spin up an orchestra in your livingroom while composing an operatic piece in 1800 :)

gramie 2y ago
My son is a composer, and he told me that he doesn't even need a keyboard any more, when he composes (he composes on paper, then transfers it to music notation software when it's ready to distribute). He also, sometimes, has a photographic memory for music. In university he had a listening test on a piece of classical music. He was able to visualize the score that he had studied when in high school, and identify the types and numbers of instruments.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Nice, that's great! People who compose complex, lengthy pieces always impress me. It's such a cool skill, and there's something so transcendental about it, somehow.
- grugagag 2y ago
  It’s probably like writing. Writing by hand to avoid distractions then import into editing software
  - solumunus 2y ago
    Well yes, but doing that with writing requires no special ability. If you can’t generate music accurately in your head then this simply wouldn’t be an option for you.

w-m 2y ago

I'm quite confused. I learned 20+ years ago that lead poisining from the wine was the cause, or at least the suspected cause of Beethovens deafness. It's great that they found lead in his hair (again?), but thoroughly weird that they don't mention that it was the go-to theory already. On a large tangent, I tried asking GPT-4o to check the article whether it mentions that previously that theory already existed (could have overlooked it). GPT-4o confidently made up a complete quote from the article, then doubled down after I said I couldn't find the quote, and finally reversed its opinion 180 degrees. It's of course much too early to tell, but my feeling from a handful queries has been that GPT-4o hallucinates quite a bit more than GPT-4.

deepakg 2y ago
Indeed! There was even a book on the topic I read years ago. Lead poisoning seemed quite conclusive even back then. https://www.amazon.com/Beethovens-Hair-Extraordinary-Historical-Scientific/dp/076790351X https://www.amazon.com/Beethovens-Hair-Extraordinary-Histori...
prvc 2y ago
That particular sample was shown to have been a fake last year when multiple purported hair samples were compared.
cranberryturkey 2y ago
I spent the last 20 hours using 4o writing a tauri/rust desktop app. I don't know rust, so it was a LOT of pasting errors back in copying back to my code. But I'd say after about 14 hours it got very lazy. Does AI get tired like humans?
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Tell it you will give it tips for kWhrs.
- efields 2y ago
  Sounds productive. Don't forget to take breaks, drink water, and sleep.

jorgesborges 2y ago

Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers that he never sent but it’s often referred to as a suicide note. It’s interesting — apparently he hid his bad hearing for a long time and considered it a humiliation. From the letter it also sounds like he was a real dick to people around him as a result, but they weren’t aware. So it serves as a sort of confession, apology and goodbye. You can read it here it’s pretty short. https://nac-cna.ca/en/stories/story/beethovens-complete-heiligenstadt-testament https://nac-cna.ca/en/stories/story/beethovens-complete-heil...

lioeters 2y ago
That is heart-breaking, and will probably make me cry the next time I listen to his music.
busymom0 2y ago
Any reason why there's no periods in it?
lqet 2y ago
Beethoven surely was an interesting character. He often had trouble finding apartments because he was such a difficult neighbor (and it didn't help that he played his piano as loud as possible, so that he could hear it). One time, he was arrested because he was creeping around Wiener Neustadt at night, dressed like a beggar, and peeping into living rooms. Nobody believed he was the famous composer, and a local organist had to be brought in to identify Beethoven. He also fought a long violent legal battle for custody of his nephew Karl after the death of his brother (Beethoven hated his sister-in-law) which lead to a suicide attempt of Karl, and the break-off of all contact. His sister-in-law in turn told the authorities that the "van" in Beethovens surname had nothing to do with nobility (as he seemingly had claimed), but was just a normal surname in in the Flemish region of his ancestors. What I also find highly fascinating are the entries in his conversation books which document how relatives tried to teach him basic math. It's strange to see that one of greatest composers in human history was unable to grasp multiplication or division.
- cdelsolar 2y ago

jtc331 2y ago

How does one conclude from genetics that he had hepatitis B? Similarly how can you rule out IBS from his DNA when it can be caused by e.g. specific bacteria in the gut?

throwup238 2y ago
> How does one conclude from genetics that he had hepatitis B? Hepatitis B uses reverse transcription as a part of its lifecycle like a retrovirus, leaving some genetic markers in the host.

gymbeaux 2y ago

So why is his music considered “classical” and not “heavy metal”?

rossant 2y ago
That's a good one.
eviks 2y ago
It's too old, so all the metal has been eaten by rust

rompic 2y ago

There's a very interesting German (Austrian) podcast episode about this here: https://www.falter.at/podcasts/gerichtsmedizin/20221202/klenk-reiter-folge-9-der-raetselhafte-tod-beethovens https://www.falter.at/podcasts/gerichtsmedizin/20221202/klen...

leobg 2y ago
That was great. No chronic lead poisoning after all. Lead poisoning started only within ~100 days before his death, mostly caused by medical interventions (lead based antiseptic, lead based medicine) when he was treated for symptoms of an undiagnosed hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.

rob74 2y ago

> We have analyzed the hair of lead smelter workers and found there is too much contamination, unable to be removed from washing, to be able to infer blood lead concentrations Well yeah, lead smelters probably have a higher lead concentration in their hair than in their blood. However, if you ingest the lead and it shows up in your hair, it's probably safe to say that the blood concentration must have been pretty high (although it's not possible to infer the exact number of course).

Log_out_ 2y ago

Freude schöner götterfunken .. The berstein berlin concerts

jgalt212 2y ago

> Researchers tested two authenticated locks of Beethoven’s hair. How many authenticated locks are known to exist?

lostemptations5 2y ago

There are a number of people commenting about how Beethoven could hear music in his head, being deaf, and thus compose entire symphonies. But at that time the musical instruments of the day were incredibly "standardized". Basically it was all orchestral instruments such as violins, percuasion, and all the usual fair -- and by the time Beethoven went deaf he was intimately familiar with these such that he could IMAGINE it all in his head. Even if you went deaf tomorrow, in 20 years time you would still be able to imagine a violin -- it is a very distinctive instrument. So I think this feat -- while wonderful-- is pretty explainable.

flappyeagle 2y ago
I don’t think they’re astonished by his ability to imagine instruments. They are more remarking that he is considered the gold standard of music composition and he couldn’t hear what he was writing. Most artists still need the feedback loop of do something, evaluate it, iterate.
- lostemptations5 2y ago
  Ok fair enough. Put that way it makes sense.

AlbertCory 2y ago

I think this was in Immortal Beloved (do I have the details right?). So touching. At the premier of his 9th Symphony, he was off to the side of the "real" conductor, waving his baton while the orchestra ignored him. When it stopped, the audience went wild. The contralto gently turned him around so he could SEE the ovation, being unable to hear it.