The Lockdown Chronicles 27: Ludwig

Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

On the advice of his doctor, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) moved to Heiligenstadt from April to October 1802 in an attempt to come to terms with his hearing loss. There he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament (1802), a letter to his brothers which records his thoughts on his growing deafness and his resolution to continue living for and through his art (Cooper 1996: 169-172) [Wikipedia entry].

Text sources in addition to those in the footnote captions: Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament (6 October 1802), via Gilbert, J.V. (1998) “E85.2073: Music Literature: The Classical Period”, NYU; Cooper, B., ed. (1996) The Beethoven Companion. Thames and Hudson; Saba, S. (22 April 2020) “How home working leaves deaf people out of the loop during coronavirus”, the Guardian.

Source image: “Beethoven’s walk in nature”, by Julius Schmid, original at Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, file used via Wikimedia Commons; Public Domain where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA.

References

Austria Official Travel Portal, “Up-to-date information on the Coronavirus situation “, available at https://www.austria.info/en/service-and-facts/coronavirus-information/  [Accessed 14 May 2020]

Action on Hearing Loss (Last updated 12 May 2020) “Managing tinnitus and stress during the Covid-19 (coronavirus) outbreak”, available at  https://beta.actiononhearingloss.org.uk/coronavirus-response/managing-tinnitus-and-stress-during-the-covid-19-coronavirus-outbreak/  [Accessed 14 May 2020]

Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament (6 October 1802), via Gilbert, J.V. (1998) “E85.2073: Music Literature: The Classical Period”, NYU; available at https://www.nyu.edu/classes/gilbert/classic/heiligenstadt.html  [Accessed 14 May 2020]

Cooper, B., ed. (1996) The Beethoven Companion. Thames and Hudson.

Saba, S. (22 April 2020) “How home working leaves deaf people out of the loop during coronavirus”, the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/22/how-home-working-leaves-deaf-people-out-loop-coronavirus Available at [Accessed 14 May 2020]

“Beethoven’s walk in nature”, by Julius Schmid, original at Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, file used via Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven_walk.jpg [Accessed 14 May 2020]

 

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The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.