How Beethoven could be helped today
By Ebhard Nitschke
BONN (IN): "Beethoven's house is Bonn's landmark", says a tourist brochure.
Bonn will this year celebrate the 225th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, the town's greatest son. The many thousands of Beethoven fans who every year visit the house where he was born, which is now being renovated, also find four technical exhibits which are closely bound up with the genius's fate. They are big ear trumpets -- the attempts of a then still impotent technology to help the deaf -- with which the great composer, who lost his hearing early, tried to complete his life's work.
The "apparatuses" were constructed between 1812 and 1814 by mechanic Johann Malzel, who later become famous for inventing the metronome (the instrument used in music for marking the time). Beethoven, born in Bonn in 1770, died in Vienna in 1827. His last grand piano, made available to him by the Vienesse court piano- maker Konrad Graf, is also a special construction for someone hard of hearing. The piano came to Bonn via Switzerland.
Admirers of Beethoven's music today are shocked by such an aid. Even Schindler, Beethoven's confidant and secretary, reported four years before the master's death that Beethoven's playing of the instrument had an "unharmonious, indeed deafening" effect upon listeners. The state-of-the-art in technology and medicine in those days couldn't help Beethoven.
Today, the German company Siemens, one of the world's biggest electro-technology and electronics firms, advertises its hearing aids with Beethoven's problems, although without naming the master. Siemens has achieved with new hearing aid amplifiers what hitherto hardly seem possible -- to so amplify low tones that they enter the malfunctioning ear undistorted.
"K-Amp" is the name of an integrated semiconductor switch. It has been developed for patients, such as Beethoven was, whose demands for tone quality are particularly high.
Beethoven's mechanic Malzel would have been astounded by the technological effort. On a surface area of only 25 square millimeters, the experts have packed into the three-channel IC (integrated circuit) filter the amplifier, regulating switches, memory components, and much more. If the patient still can't hear anything, a technology is used in which implanted electrodes stimulate the inner air. Beethoven could certainly have been helped by today's hearing aid technology.
More than 100 years ago, in 1889, Beethoven's birth-house in Bonn was threatened with demolition. But it was rescued by the then newly-founded "Verein (Association) Beeethovenhaus". Using donations, the members bought the building and restored it. That step solved a puzzle which had endured for almost twenty years, from 1871 to 1890. Beethoven's parents -- Ludwig's father was court musician to the Prince Elector of Cologne who resided in Bonn-had namely had four successive homes in Bonn. And two of them during this period proudly displayed marble tablets which said the "famous Compositeur" was born there.
Renovating the Beethovenhaus this year will cost DM 2 million. The whole of Germany is called upon to donate money. Until the house is opened to visitors again for the anniversary ceremonies, at least a part of its treasures can be seen in another of Bonn's memorial places. That is the Ernst Moritz Arndt Haus, in which the patriotic poet, author and university professor whose life goal was German unity, lived until his death in 1860.