oct 1, 1802 - Heiligenstadt Testament

Description:

Marks the start of Beethoven's defiant middle period.

Beethoven's unsent letter to his brothers telling them that he was losing his hearing and that he was considering suicide, although his art and composing kept him on the planet. Thusly-named after Heiligenstadt, which is a suburb of Vienna where Beethoven was living at the time.

Almost mythologically famous, it encoded many ideas of what we think of Beethoven today.

A successful dead composer is a virtually superhuman idea. It suggests superhuman suffering and superhuman victory, playing directly into the quasi-religious Romantic notion of the great artist as humanity's redeemer. That scenario--of tremendous suffering and terrific vitory--became the context in which Beethoven's music has been received. And, as we shall shortly see, that scenario also was consciously encoded by the composer in some of his most celebrated works, in which "struggles" against "Fate" end in "heroic triumph".

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