{"id":562,"date":"2010-09-08T10:04:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T10:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/09\/08\/beethoven-moments\/"},"modified":"2010-09-08T10:04:03","modified_gmt":"2010-09-08T10:04:03","slug":"beethoven-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/09\/08\/beethoven-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Beethoven Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poor Michael Berkeley<\/a> \u2013 a brilliant composer facing what we hope very much is only a temporary loss of his hearing \u2013 has written a fascinating piece about his experience<\/a>. Required reading for all fans of Berkeley, Beethoven and Stravinsky (who didn\u2019t lose his hearing, but features strongly) \u2013 and also for anyone who still likes to turn up the rock music volume too high. A salutory lesson lies therein. And hearing loss, as Berkeley points out, isn\u2019t only about \u2018loss\u2019, it\u2019s also, and probably more disturbingly, about distortion of sounds. <\/p>\n

Beethoven wasn\u2019t the only great composer who lost his hearing; Faur\u00e9<\/a> also went deaf, losing hearing gradually from middle age until by his last years nothing was left. His son, who wrote an important book about him, explains that this malady affected the pitch at which Faur\u00e9 was able to register notes: high notes sounded about a third too low and low ones pulled similarly in the opposite direction, while the middle range would be in tune, but faint. Faur\u00e9 complained, too, of \u201cnoises that don\u2019t exist\u2026sounds that split in two, an appalling din.\u201d He wrote to his wife:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI\u2019m knocked sideways by this disease which has attacked the very part of me I needed to keep intact. It\u2019s disrespectful, or at least ill-judged, to compare myself with Beethoven. The second half of his life was nothing but despair! There are passages of music and isolated timbres which I simply can\u2019t hear at all.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Deafness is one of the most devastating prospects that any musician can face and we wish Michael the speediest possible recovery. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s some light relief: an amazing story about Beethoven\u2019s deafness that Krystian Zimerman told during our Royal Festival Hall pre-concert interview a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

Beethoven, Krystian related, developed a rather extraordinary means of by-passing his damaged ears. He would rest a thin wooden stick against the piano keyboard and place the other end against his teeth; the vibrations of the sound would be conveyed through the connecting bones within his head and could have led him to \u201chear\u201d if not exactly better then maybe more minutely than most of us. <\/p>\n

Krystian, who was playing Beethoven\u2019s Op.111, had been intrigued by that story and wanted to see, or hear, for himself the effects of such a system. He\u2019s a nocturnal individual and likes to work at the piano in the middle of the night (yes, he does have a soundproofed studio), so he tried it out at 3am, donning a motorbike helmet to simulate hearing loss. So when his wife looked in to see what he was up to, there he was in a helmet bending over the piano with a stick between his teeth and the keys\u2026 <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

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No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poor Michael Berkeley – a brilliant composer facing what we hope very much is only a temporary loss of his hearing – has written a fascinating piece about his experience. Required reading for all fans of Berkeley, Beethoven and Stravinsky (who didn’t lose his hearing, but features strongly) – and also for anyone who still likes to turn up the rock music volume too high. A salutory lesson lies therein. And hearing loss, as Berkeley points out, isn’t only about ‘loss’, it’s also, and probably more disturbingly, about distortion of sounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}