For a composer, hearing loss sounds like a sentence. Ludwig van Beethoven began noticing the problem in his late twenties, and by middle age he was profoundly deaf. He wrote of despair, isolation, and the fear that his artistic life might be closing in front of him while he was still alive inside it.
Instead, Beethoven kept composing. The piano sonatas deepened. The late string quartets grew stranger and more daring. Then came the Ninth Symphony, with its great choral finale reaching for brotherhood and joy. When it premiered in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven could not hear the applause that exploded behind him and had to be turned toward the audience to see it.
What makes the story endure is not the neat slogan that genius conquers all. Beethoven suffered terribly. The endurance lies in the fact that suffering did not get final editorial control over his imagination. He wrote past the silence, and the world has been listening ever since.