Beethoven was profoundly deaf when he composed the Ninth Symphony

When Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna on May 7, 1824, its composer was profoundly deaf. The work that gave the world the “Ode to Joy” one of the most performed melodies in history was written by a man who could not hear it performed, who never heard a single note of it outside his own imagination.

Beethoven stood on stage that night, beating time beside the actual conductor, Michael Umlauf, who had quietly told the musicians to ignore the composer entirely and follow his own baton instead. Beethoven, lost in the score, kept conducting after the music had stopped.

The hall erupted and he heard nothing.

According to the standard account, one of the singers had to step forward and physically turn Beethoven around so he could see what he could not hear: the audience on its feet, waving hats and handkerchiefs in wave after wave of applause. Some accounts place the moment at the end of the symphony, others after an earlier movement, but the image is the same a man receiving an ovation through his eyes.

His deafness had crept in over decades, the cruelest possible affliction for a musician, and by his final years it was near total. Yet the Ninth its surging choral finale especially is anything but the work of a diminished man. Beethoven composed by holding the architecture of the music in his mind, hearing it perfectly where no one else could follow. The premiere’s most famous image, of a deaf composer turned to face a triumph he could only see, has become a lasting symbol of exactly that.