During these years, his deafness continued to progress. By the late 1810s, he had essentially abandoned public performance. He continued to compose, relying on his internalized sense of how music would sound rather than on what he could physically hear. The conversation books, which survive in substantial numbers, begin to appear as a consistent record of daily life from around 1818 and document both the practical challenges of his situation—the need to have every exchange written down—and the breadth of his engagement with the world. Visitors wrote about music, politics, philosophy, food, and gossip. Beethoven’s responses, when he wrote them in the notebooks, show a man who remained fully engaged with ideas and with human company despite the isolation his deafness created.
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## The Late Works and the Question of What Silence Meant
The final decade of Beethoven’s life—the period from roughly 1815 to his death in 1827—produced a body of work that remains among the most discussed and debated in Western music. The late string quartets, in particular, have attracted an extraordinary range of interpretive attention from musicians, critics, and scholars who have found in them a compressed intensity, a willingness to break conventional form, and an interior quality that sets them apart from almost anything else in the repertoire.
The Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824 and premiered that year, was in some respects the most public work of this period—a large-scale symphony with soloists and choir, setting Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in its finale and concluding with music that would, in the twentieth century, become the anthem of the European Union. Beethoven could not hear its premiere. The story that has been told and retold—of the composer standing with his back to the audience, being turned around by one of the soloists so he could see the applause he could not hear—is documented well enough to be treated as substantially accurate, though individual accounts of the premiere vary in detail.