What is more difficult to assess is what deafness meant for the music of this period. The most discussed claim—that the late works are products of an increasingly inward, purely mental conception of music, freed from the constraints of what was physically audible—has been argued and contested for as long as the works have been discussed. Beethoven’s sketches from this period show a composer who remained acutely interested in practical musical detail: specific harmonic choices, instrumental ranges, rhythmic precision. He was not working in an abstraction that had lost contact with the physical reality of sound. He had internalized sound over decades of playing and hearing music, and he was working from that internalized knowledge.
The 2023 genomic study—and the decades of medical and historical research that preceded it—have never claimed to illuminate what Beethoven heard in his head when he composed. The question of how a deaf composer imagined and notated music that has been described as among the most “purely musical” ever written is a question that genomics cannot answer. It belongs to a different order of inquiry, one that involves musicology, psychology, and the analysis of the works themselves.
What the genomic study did was establish the biological context of the life—the health conditions, the genetic predispositions, the ancestral origins—with a level of evidentiary precision that was not previously available. That context is genuinely illuminating, and it fills in details that the historical record, on its own, cannot provide. But it does not translate into an explanation of the music, and the researchers who conducted the study did not claim it did.