BEETHOVEN DEAF: THE BEETHOVEN MYTH AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEAFNESS By DEVIN MICHAEL PAUL BURKE Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts Thesis Adviser: Dr. Francesca Brittan Department of Music CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2010 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ______________________________________________________ candidate for the ________________________________degree *. (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................ 2 Abstract ................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1: The Heiligenstadt Testament, the Emerging Social Category of “Deafness,” and the Dual Nature of Disability ......................................... 20 Private and Public Deafness and the Heiligenstadt Testament ..... 24 “Visualizing” Beethoven’s deafness ............................................. 41 Conclusions ................................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Richard Wagner’s Beethoven centenary essay and the social construction of “normalcy” in the nineteenth century .............................. 54 Hearing perspectives ..................................................................... 59 Deaf history perspectives .............................................................. 63 Conclusion .................................................................................... 77 Chapter 3: The Beethoven Biopic and the Cinema of Isolation ........................... 79 Institutional biases against disability in film ................................ 81 The techniques of isolation ........................................................... 88 Conclusions ................................................................................. 106 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 113 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 114 1 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. 2, mm. 134-164 ................... 45 Figure 2. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 243-267 ............................ 48 Figure 3. Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, Mvt. III, m. 316-344 ........................... 49 Figure 4. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 1-6 ...................................... 50 Figure 5. Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135, mvt. IV, m. 171-176 .............................. 51 Figure 6 Opening shot of Immortal Beloved ................................................................... 91 2 Beethoven Deaf: The Beethoven Myth and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Deafness Abstract by DEVIN MICHAEL PAUL BURKE In the late-eighteenth century, not long before Ludwig van Beethoven began to experience the first symptoms of hearing loss, an important historical shift in the understanding of deafness took place in Europe. This shift resulted from the birth of deaf education, of the deaf community, and of deafness itself as a social category. The history of deafness, and more broadly of disability, has been neglected by musicologists, and in this thesis I map out points of intersection between Beethoven reception history and deaf history to show that these histories can enlighten each other. I focus on three “documents” of Beethoven reception—the Heiligenstadt Testament, Richard Wagner’s 1870 Beethoven essay, and twentieth-century Beethoven biopics—to show that Beethoven has been used to normalize hearing and construct deafness as its pathological opposite, even as his example shows that hearing loss does not negate music. 3 Introduction Two essentially irreconcilable “models” for interpreting deafness lie at the heart of a cultural debate concerning the deaf community. The first, most popularly labeled as the Disability model, views deafness as a pathological defect, a deviation from the “normal,” while the Linguistic Minority model views deafness as a different way of life, and views the deaf community as a culture with a common language (sign language). Any study of deafness must engage with the debate between these two points of view. Deaf studies scholars have historically distinguished between the Disability and Linguistic Minority models in their writing through the use of a capitalized Deaf to refer to the latter model. The lower-case “deaf,” as in “deaf person,” usually refers to the person’s medically-defined hearing ability, while the capitalized “Deaf” refers to the set of shared values, behaviors, history, and traditions that constitute Deaf culture, as well as to the people who actively live in that shared culture.1 The lower-case “deaf” can also be used to describe the deaf community, in the definition suggested by Deaf historian Carol Padden: “A deaf community may include persons who are not themselves Deaf, but who actively support the goals of the community and work with Deaf people to achieve them.”2 More broadly, the difference between the two views represents the gulf between the hearing population and the deaf population. The Disability model is by far the 1 For a brief overview of this usage see the introduction to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1-10. 2 As I am myself hearing, and an outsider to Deaf culture, I have tried to use the capitalized Deaf with sensitivity and when in doubt, have used the lower-case orthography. See Carol Padden, “The Deaf Community and the Culture of Deaf People,” in American Deaf Culture: An Anthology, ed. by Sherman Wilcox (Burtonsville, Maryland: Linstok Press, 1989), 5. 4 dominant view of the hearing majority population, usually to the extent that it is taken for granted as an intuitive, “natural” truth. The deaf community has fought for a wider acceptance of the linguistic minority model, not the least because of its important implications for public policies that affect millions of people in the U.S. and abroad. The Linguistic Minority model recognizes sign language as a system of communication that has all the expressive capabilities of spoken language. This view of sign language is relatively new; in fact, one could say that it is fifty years old as of this year. In 1960, linguist William Stokoe published a paper titled “Sign language structures: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf.”3 Stokoe, who was a hearing man, had been teaching at Gallaudet University, and noticed over time that the sign language used by his deaf students had a definite and unique linguistic structure. The publication of his article, and his Dictionary of American Sign Language in 1965, represented a watershed moment in the history of the deaf community.4 Stokoe’s work demonstrated that sign language was not just a pale imitation of spoken language, but that it was a unique form of linguistic expression. This finding was also an important moment in the history of linguistics, because it has challenged widely-accepted linguistic models. For deaf people, sign language had received an unexpected legitimization, and it led to a renewed sense of community that has grown ever since. This new validation of sign language was especially important because sign language had been widely banned in the teaching of deaf children for eighty years. The 3 William Stokoe, Jr., “Sign language structures: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf,” Studies in Linguistics: Occasional Papers 8 (Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo, 1960), 3-78. 4 William Stokoe, Jr., Carl Cronenberg, and Dorothy Casterline, Dictionary of American Sign Language (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press, 1965). 5 time between 1880 and 1960 is sometimes referred to in the deaf community as “the Dark Ages.” In 1880, at the international congress of deaf educators in Milan, a group of deaf educators (the vast majority of whom were hearing) imposed a ban on manual (sign) language as a teaching tool. The purpose was to force deaf students to do their best to fit in to “normal” society, but the effect was to ban the most natural way of communicating for deaf people. This ban was philosophically tied to notions of progress, nationalism, and eugenics, and one of its leading advocates was Alexander Graham Bell. Bell also vehemently argued against allowing deaf people to marry each other in an effort to limit deaf people’s reproductive rights, supporting his arguments with numerous “scientific” studies. As an internationally recognized figure, Bell was able to exert a great deal of influence on the rights of the deaf community in his time. He has since been referred to as the “bogey man”