By 1802, it was clear that no treatment was working. His doctors—particularly Johann Adam Schmidt, who would be mentioned in the Heiligenstadt Testament—seem to have advised rest and relief from the pressures of city life, which is why Beethoven was in Heiligenstadt in the summer of 1802. The rest did not restore his hearing. And in October of that year, alone in the small spa village, he wrote the letter to his brothers that he never sent.
The Heiligenstadt Testament is not primarily a document of resignation. It is, in fact, a document of extraordinary determination. Beethoven describes, in its pages, the point at which he had stood at the edge of suicide and had drawn back. The reason he gave for drawing back was art. He wrote that he felt he had not yet said what he needed to say. He was not prepared to leave the world before he had done what he believed he was capable of doing.
This is the framework within which the Heiligenstadt Testament’s request for posthumous medical investigation makes sense. Beethoven was not asking for pity. He was asking, in effect, for the scientific record to be set straight—for the nature of his condition to be understood and described, so that the world would know what he had been living with and what he had accomplished despite it. The implicit message is that the music should be understood in context. The context was suffering.
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## The Heroic Period and Its Costs