From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

by Arthur C. Brooks

“He is ready to end his life; only moral rectitude keeps him back.”[20] So wrote a close friend of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven, whose life had become a hero’s journey gone wrong. Beethoven was named after his grandfather, who lived from 1712 to 1773 and was generally considered the preeminent musician in the city of Bonn. His grandson showed the same prodigious talents from an early age: as a young man working in Vienna, Beethoven was often thought of as the artistic heir to the recently deceased Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He studied with the world-famous Joseph Haydn, as well as musical masters Antonio Salieri and Johann Albrechtsberger. It was legitimate to believe that Beethoven would be the greatest composer of his time, and one of the greatest pianists to boot. Ambitious and hardworking, by his late twenties he was already famous. For some years, however, he had been troubled by a strange buzzing and ringing in his ears. “For the last three years my hearing has grown steadily weaker,” Beethoven wrote to his doctor in 1801, when he was thirty. “In the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and ... from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” He held out hope that his hearing problem could be remediated. But that hope was fading by the year, as it became clear to him and those around him that there was no hope of remission. Beethoven was going deaf. What fate could be crueler...