People tell me that I should write what I know, so when I decided to write about Beethoven’s music and his deafness.

I rummaged through the drawers of my mind for a relevant memory.

In an almost forgotten corner, I found myself on a wintery day, circa 2007, in the snowy, icy woods in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On that day, we were on a short, organized trip entitled “Survivorship in Wintery Woods,” or something like that. We were excited, all dressed up in multiple layers of clothing and ready to explore.

Our guide, Bill (I am sure he had no last name), had dark, scratched sunglasses and a long beard that had not met a comb for more than a decade. He took us for a long walk on a remote trail deep into the woods and asked us to walk in different directions until we could no longer see or hear each other.

I walked and walked, in the wet snow, in the cold air, until my knees hurt and the fear of losing my way back to the starting point overcame my curiosity. When I stopped, I could see no one else in my group. The forest around me was white, motionless, threatening. It was also very quiet. No! not just quiet, it was silent, completly silent! it was the closest I have ever come to being deaf.

My eery, near-deafness experience lasted only a few seconds. It is hard to duplicate: close your eyes, cover them with an eye mask to block the light out, or enter a dark room (the kind that was used, years ago, to develop films and photographs) and you may come close, for a moment, to what a blind person experiences, but no matter how hard I pressed my palms against my ears, I could not block sound.

“For the last three years,” Ludwig Van Beethoven wrote to Dr. Franz Wegeler in June 1801, “my hearing has grown steadily weaker . . . I can give you some idea of this peculiar deafness when I must tell you that in the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and that from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices. . . Sometimes too I hardly hear people who speak softly. The sound I can hear it is true, but not the words. And yet if anyone shouts I can’t bear it.”

Beethoven’s hearing loss was progressive: in 1804, he was still able to hear conversations (and to conduct the first performance of Eroica). In 1806, he reported difficulties in hearing the woodwinds. In 1810, he reported “cotton in my ears at the pianoforte frees my hearing from the unpleasant buzzing.” In 1815, Beethoven needed different hearing trumpets (the hearing aid of the time looked like a small trumpet, the narrow side of which was held close to the ear to facilitate hearing). In 1822, Beethoven reported pain on listening to instrumental playing.

On May 8, at the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was so deaf that he did not realize that the music has ended. One of the soloists had to physically turn him to acknowledge the public. In 1826, it is believed, Beethoven became completely deaf.

To understand Beethoven’s deafness, I try to briefly review my knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the ear. The function of the ear, I remember from Biology 101 class, is to convert physical vibration, or sound waves, into an electrical impulse that would travel through nerves. The sound waves travel through the external ear and hit the tympanic membrane, a thin membrane which is spread across the auditory canal like a taut skin over a drum. Three tiny bones shaped like a hammer, an anvil and a stirrup conduct sound from the tympanic membrane to the inner ear. There, if you would look close enough, you would find a tiny structure, about 0.2 milliliter in volume, which looks like a snail shell. It is called the cochlea which is ancient Greek for spiral, or snail shell.

It is within this tiny organ, the cochlea, that 30,000 hair cells reside. Immersed in fluid, these cells specialize in translating vibration into tiny electric nerve fibers which then transmit the signals to the brain.

What part of Beethoven’s ear became dysfunctional? Did his ossicles become fused to the degree they could not properly transmit vibration? Were the hair cells within his cochlea damaged? Perhaps more intriguing: What caused Beethoven’s deafness? And how did his deafness effect his music?

Curious? I shall return with the answers, in two short weeks.

Editor’s note: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist working in several locations in the Upper Peninsula. Contact him by email or at DrMadjar.com.