Was Beethoven completely deaf while he was composing his 9th symphony? I would think that partial deafness would be a whole lot better than complete deafness. A related question is whether a musical genius really needs to hear the music to create a pleasant sound. Does not being able to hear really make it more difficult? My suspicion is that Beethoven could still know exactly what each note sounds like from memory.
Yes, Beethoven was completely deaf several years before he wrote the 9th symphony.
Although it was extremely impressive that Beethoven was able to compose so many masterpieces while deaf, most great composers back then could write great music without improvising/experimenting/whatever with an actual instrument - just using their mind’s ear. Composers back in the day would write music as fluently as a normal person could write words, and just as you don’t have to say words out loud as you write them down, they didn’t have to actually hear music to write it. So although no one else of Beethoven’s stature went deaf (so we’ll never know for sure), I would bet that Bach, Mozart, Haydn, et al., could have done so.
It is important to remember that Beethoven was not born deaf. He could hear for much of his life. He knew what the instruments and notes sounded like, even if he couldn’t hear them at the time.
Heah, it’s just like a house painter can still paint a house if blind. He remembers what houses and colors look like. There is no reason that a composer needs to hear what the music sounds like. As an example, the 9th symphony is the best piece of music ever written, and it was written by a deaf guy. Maybe all composers should blow their eardrums out.
It is said that by the time he composed the Ninth Symphony, the only thing he could hear was thunder. It is also said that when he conducted the premier of the Ninth, they had to turn him around at the end, so he could see the audience’s ovation.
I’d think that conducting while deaf is an even greater feat than composing while deaf. Conducting requires an enormous amount of interaction between the conductor and the orchestra.
They let him conduct it as a courtesy to him but the orchestra weren’t really following his lead. In fact at the end, when the orchestra finished, he carried on waving his arms not realising they’d finished and the contralto singer came out and turned him around to face the applause.
The audience cheered him anyway out of respect
So did he really have a stick attached to the piano, that he bit so that he could hear the notes?
But, really, does the ninth symphony contain anything so truly new that he would have had to have heard it for the first time? Even I can follow the general rules for harmony and melody and create something without knowing what it actually sounds like.
It isn’t a dead art. With respect to orchestral sounds, contemporary composers can do it, too. If they can’t, they can work with an orchestrator.
Actually audilogy is very new. He could have been deaf or he could only have been severely hard of hearing. There’s really no way to tell. In addition, hearing losses can be kind of like being “nearsighted” or farsighted. I for example, cannot hear thunder unless it’s directly overhead even with my hearing aids. I also have trouble hearing males even with my hearing aids. Yet I can talk to females without even speechreading. One of my friends who was a music major said that Beethoven composed with a stick in his teeth. That points to the fact that he could have had a conductive loss (most likely otoscerlosis since it was progressive)
Maybe a better analogy would be a master programmer writing source code without having a computer to try it out on.
It is, of course, well known that his deafness was caused by his habit of stuffing coffee grounds in his ears whenever he saw P.D.Q. Bach approaching.
Yes, we’ll never know what modern audiology would have uncovered about his deafness, but based on his complaints, he was for all intents completely deaf by the 9th (since that is the point asked by the OP! He couldn’t hear any conversations, which led to a unique record of conversations because he used to carry notebooks with him, so people could write down what they wanted to say, and he would respond verbally. Because he was a packrat, we have many of those notebooks and can see a record of one side of his conversations. And he reported not being able to hear anything.
The story of the stick, IIRC was earlier in the progression of his deafness when he discovered that he could still hear a little by that technique, but he definitely reached the point where that no longer worked.
On the other hand, I thought that untreated oto could result in total deafness…like in some cases it invades the coachla…Then again, I thought people with oto could “hear” (not hearing person hear, but still hear) through vibrations etc.
IIRC, according to Pete and Dud, it was the result of his piano becoming completely stuffed and muffled by his unwashed, dirty underwear.
But I suppose we will will never really know for sure. 
Or the way we old former typesetters used to write complicated formats without a monitor.
Sorry, I’ve been meaning to respond to this for almost two weeks now. What follows is a Wild Ass Guess with little or no documentary evidence to back it up.
First point - while Beethoven could (and did) compose his later works without being able to hear them, the evidence suggests that he preferred to compose by ear. The sketchbooks show someone obsessively honing his compositional craft. The fact that in the middle period he invested tremendous time and energy in pursuing ‘hearing aids’ - ear trumpets, sawing the legs off his piano to increase its resonance and holding a stick in his teeth to transmit bone resonance, all would seem to indicate someone who wants to hear his music played rather than just transcribing music that he hears in his head, as Mozart apparently did.
One of the things I’d like to clarify is the popular image of hearing loss. Many people seem to think that loss of hearing means that hearing has been replaced with silence, just as vision is replaced with blackness when you close your eyes. People whose deafness includes tinnitus do not hear silence - they hear noise, and lots of it. Severe tinnitus would make it difficult to impossible to compose, as the noise in your head interferes with your ability to hear the music in your head.
To go back to vision for a moment, many blind people have some perception of light vs. dark. In some cases, what they perceive with their eyes is so distorted or incomplete that it can’t be trusted. Hence the notion of ‘legally blind’.
Beethoven did not want to merely recap his earlier successes - he wanted to continue to develop his musical language in his late period, as he had done before with his early to middle period music.
I submit the hypothosis, that Beethoven may have suffered from a catastrophic level of tinnitus that, combined with natural hearing loss due to aging, left him unable to hear anything but the noises in his own head. I would like to see if there is anything in the conversation books, the letters or in any of the biographies that would provide any evidence for this hypothosis.
For a composer who seemed to want, possibly to need to hear his works to make his choices, this must have been like watching diamonds drown in a sea of tar.
I just watched a very nice DVD called “In Search of Beethoven” which has nothing to do with the awful “In Search of” series that ran in the US. It has numerous musicians and musical historians talking about (and playing) Beethoven.
First, in the segment about the Ninth they said that he was standing on the side, not conducting. He had stopped even playing piano in public some time before.
It was also mentioned that he would bug piano makers to get louder pianos for him. They also mentioned his investment in ever bigger hearing aids, as has been mentioned above. During his early deafness he became asocial because he did not want to admit that he, a composer, was no longer able to hear.
The most interesting comment was that one musician thought some of his great later works came from him being cut off from the normal current of music at the time through his deafness, and he soared well above where anyone else was. I don’t remember if the Grosse fuge was the example used, but it well could have been.
In the wonderful “Haus der Musik” in Vienna, they have maybe a dozen or so of Beethoven’s ear horns, in order of chronology and size.