And then he began losing his hearing.
—
## The Terror of What Was Coming
The years between 1796 and 1802 represent one of the most psychologically complex periods in Beethoven’s documented life, because they were the years in which he knew he was losing his hearing and worked to keep the knowledge from becoming public.
His letters from this period are striking in their mixture of creative vitality and personal anguish. He was composing prolifically—the First and Second Symphonies, the first piano concertos, many of the early piano sonatas, chamber music. He was building a reputation that had already reached beyond Vienna. He was also, in private correspondence with close friends, describing a condition that terrified him.
In 1801, he wrote to two friends—Karl Amenda and Franz Wegeler—letters that are among the most candid documents he left behind. To Amenda he wrote that he had been carrying “a great secret” for the past two years: that his hearing had worsened enormously. He described the fear that he might lose it entirely. He described the professional danger: if it became known that the most celebrated pianist in Vienna could not hear, his career would be over. He described the social torture of pretending in company to hear things he could not hear, of asking people to speak up and having them think him simply inattentive or absent-minded.
To Wegeler, in a separate letter of the same period, he wrote more about the physical symptoms—a buzzing and ringing that had become constant, the difficulty hearing high notes, the way speech was clearer in some registers than others. He described different treatments he had tried without result. He asked Wegeler, who was a physician, for recommendations. The letter is a window into the private panic that the public Beethoven was managing to suppress.