What Beethoven Means to Deaf Artists

Text: Jeffrey Arlo Brown, VAN Magazine

In 1971, a trio of Deaf musicians named Ed Chevy, Steve Longo, and Bob Hiltermann formed a rock band. They met at Gallaudet College, a private school for deaf students in Washington, D.C. Ludwig van Beethoven was a part of the band’s story from the start: Chevy, their bassist and composer, had learned about him in a deaf history class. But back then he didn’t feel especially drawn to the composer’s work: “I wasn’t impressed with his music at that time, because we were rockers.”

The band has been together, on and off, for nearly 50 years and still plays gigs, though they’ve gone by a variety of different names over the years. Eventually, a friend suggested Beethoven’s Dream. “But the kind of music we rocked didn’t fit the dream theme,” Chevy said. “So, we changed to Beethoven’s Nightmare and that started to make sense.” The new name, which simultaneously implied a lineage with Beethoven as a Deaf musician and rejected the classical niceties associated with him, gave the band, in Chevy’s words, “the power to physically perceive who we are.”

For some Deaf artists, Beethoven is a figure of ambivalent inspiration. On the one hand, his music proves beyond a shade of doubt that deaf composers can create electrifying music. On the other, his gradual hearing loss has been frequently co-opted by the hearing world for the purposes of shallow melodrama.

Beethoven himself suffered great personal agony over his hearing loss. “How could I possibly admit such an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have enjoyed,” he wrote in his Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers, from 1802.

But this agony was used as an excuse to pathologize the entire Deaf community. In his thesis “Beethoven Deaf: The Beethoven Myth and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Deafness,” Devin Michael Paul Burke noted that “the music community, through Beethoven, has consistently acted on behalf of the Disability model” of understanding deafness: “Deafness, for music historians, has been defined almost exclusively as a defect.” This framework, as Burke argues, misses the importance of Deaf community and cultures.

All of which means that for Deaf people today—musicians and otherwise—Beethoven is complicated. He is a near-mythic titan to play off and against; a figurehead representing the struggle against the biases of the hearing world. He’s a point of pride, but also one of earned indifference; a minor saint whose most salient characteristic may not be his biography or his music, but the implied possibilities of his imagination, still potent despite his perceptual limitations.

Meanwhile, the members of Beethoven’s Nightmare have warmed to their namesake’s compositions. “We often cast off his first fragment of his Fifth Symphony to start the show,” Chevy said. He has been planning a rock adaptation of Beethoven’s ubiquitous piano piece “Für Elise,” though he hasn’t found the right way of adapting the work yet. “The mental expression is still ringing in my ears,” he explained. “One fine day, when the sun rises, I’m going back and challenging ‘Für Elise.’” (The band also covers Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.”)

Students at Gallaudet still learn about Beethoven in Deaf history classes, just as they did when Chevy was there in the early ‘70s. But in the intervening decades, Beethoven’s Nightmare has become established enough that aspiring rock musicians in the Deaf community look straight to the band for inspiration, bypassing their namesake’s compositions altogether. “I’ve met a great number of Deaf musicians who wanna rock like us,” Chevy said.

For some Deaf musicians, Beethoven is a kind of distant light. He also figures frequently in poetry by deaf writers, another form that trades—albeit more obliquely—in sound. In 1901, the deaf-blind author Morrison Heady published a long poem titled “The Double Night,” dedicating it “to the shades of Milton and Beethoven.” The very first lines of the poem can be read as an elegy to the composer’s lost hearing:

Go, bring the harp that once with dirges thrilled,
But now hangs hushed in leaden slumbers,
Save when the faltering hand untimely chilled
Steals o’er its chords in broken numbers.
It hangs in halls where shades of sorrow dwell,
Where echoless Silence tolls the passing bell,
Where shadowless Darkness weaves the shrouding spell
Of parting joys and parting years.

But this elegy is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. The harp thrilled with dirges—songs of agony. These lines seem to ask: Is “echoless Silence” really more painful than the lamenting world? Is quiet a curse or a repose? Beethoven is interesting to Heady, not for his compositions or his biography, but for the philosophical questions his output poses.

John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind writer and editor of the 2009 anthology Deaf American Poetry, noted that Beethoven became an important figure for Deaf artists almost by default. “For a good while, Beethoven had served as a ‘shade’ for all kinds of Deaf people. I mean, who else would they mentally identify with, from a historical perspective?” he said. “Until Deaf schools began to be established, the stories of Deaf people were very effectively and quickly erased.”

That dynamic is at play in “The Double Night.” Beethoven’s role in the poem is abstract and philosophical, rather than specific or personal. (For example, the harp is not an instrument closely associated with him.) But Clark pointed out that Heady identified more deeply with Beethoven than many deaf artists; his ability to play the music allowed Beethoven to undergird his poetry. “The identification process, then, was more directly meaningful, he knew more of who Beethoven was, he knew his work,” Clark said. “That extra layer must have been helpful to Heady—he owned a bit of Beethoven.” He
continued, “It wasn’t just a name or a placeholder in the consciousness, there was the act of ownership involved and that is very empowering.”

Rex Lowman’s poem “Beethoven” (1964) is an exquisite short work with an intricate rhyme structure that appears to allude to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral”:

This tree is music; and this rose
Is laughter rippling on a stream
Free-flowing into hills of dream
Grown phantasmal in evening's close.
The counterpoint of wind that blows
In faint, elusive guests is theme
For all the undertones that teem
In glimmering light which fades and glows.
This woodland that is yet a world,
Peopled with all that Eden held,
Has one cold angel, forthwith hurled
From sound to silence,—he who felled
The ululation of this wound
With all the instruments of sound.

Here, according to Clark, the dynamic between the composer who gradually lost his hearing and the Deaf poet is more fraught. Lowman “belonged to a movement you could call ‘Deaf Respectability,’ which established and maintained an elite within Deaf society,” Clark said. For him, Lowman’s invocation of Beethoven reads as a “hollow” attempt to cultivate Lowman’s own snobbishness through a universally-admired historical figure instead of appreciating more relevant pioneers of the Deaf community. “After a Deaf community has its own heroes and saints,” Clark told me, “Beethoven is no longer meaningful or even a placeholder.” For young Deaf rock musicians, groups such as Beethoven’s Nightmare can provide more direction and inspiration than the composer himself. In Deaf poetry, too, Beethoven has been replaced by more intimate models.

Still, there is another connection between Lowman’s sonnet and Beethoven’s late output. After his hearing loss, Beethoven composed music that sounds amazing. Poetry, like music, is a hearing art—it is meant to be recited as much as it is meant to be read to yourself on the page. And Lowman’s “Beethoven” is also a masterpiece of sound.

In the 2020 documentary Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, Oscar-nominated director Irene Taylor Brodsky introduces us to her son Jonas, who went Deaf in his early childhood, but has cochlear implants which allow him to hear. The film follows Jonas as he learns to play the first movement of Beethoven’s poignant piano sonata. Like Morrison Heady and the members of Beethoven’s Nightmare, the composer was for Jonas a distant shade rather than an immediate inspiration. “He didn't know anything about the history of Beethoven,” Brodsky said. “Growing up, his grandfather had [the sonata] memorized and he would just play it. He really liked it.”

Because Jonas has a cochlear implant, he is able to turn his hearing on and off. Many of the documentary's most potent scenes arise from his navigation of the liminal space between sound and silence. Occasionally he would practice the “Moonlight Sonata” with his implant off, playing through the work with what Brodsky called “the emotional sensation” of touch: fingers on keys, socks on pedals, hammers on strings.

Could Brodsky, while in another room, tell whether her son was practicing Beethoven with or without his cochlear implants? “I noticed that when he played it without the implants, his tempo would vary,” she said. “It was more variable. In a way, I think he was following more of an inner rhythm that was more connected to his mood, as opposed to following a construct.”

She continued: “When he played it with the implant on, he was playing it like the teacher taught him to play it. The teacher was teaching him to play it based on her understanding of what Beethoven's intent was. When he wasn't wearing his implant, he would just play the tempo [that he was] assuming.” She added, “He was in touch with—literally—the tempo he was playing the piece at.”

In the film, there’s a moment where Jonas is getting impatient at his piano lesson. He tells his teacher that he wants to move on from the “Moonlight Sonata,” seeing as he can already play it. She answers that he still plays some wrong notes, and that you can’t claim to perform a piece well if that’s the case.
It’s a matter of perspective. In the hearing world—and especially in classical music—Beethoven can seem omnipresent. If you’re playing his works, he might as well be looking over your shoulder for every note. In the Deaf community, Beethoven often plays a different role. How his ghost might feel about your art-making is not the point. Beethoven is a shade: a supportive yet ghostly, permeable presence in the distance.

“Beethoven doesn’t matter much, you know?” Clark said. “We can’t even hear him!”