Page 52 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

One way in which he has turned his misfortune into inspiration is through his new commission
for the Proms, which will be given its premiere by the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas

Collon on September 10. No 52 (all Ayres’s works are simply numbered in order) is subtitled

“Three pieces about Ludwig van Beethoven, dreaming, hearing loss and saying goodbye”. “I

suppose it’s a cathartic process,” Ayres says. “It’s definitely personal.”

Marking the Beethoven anniversary, the piece explores different aspects of hearing loss. In the
first movement, only for strings, the simple harmony and melody gradually buckle under layers

of noise. Ayres calls the second movement “a fake piano concerto”, in which the solo instrument

(in this case a keyboard) is disrupted with electronic effects. The third movement alternates

between orchestral statements and extremely distorted pre-taped samples, which represent “what

Beethoven might have heard”.

While every school kid knows that Beethoven was deaf, what we don’t know is how much he

was actually able to hear. At the premiere of the 9th Symphony in 1824 (three years before his
death), he still insisted on sharing the podium with another conductor who had instructed the

performers to ignore the composer’s direction entirely. Audience members reported that at the

end of the piece, after the players had stopped, Beethoven was still conducting. One of the

singers gently turned him around to face the audience, whose cheers he hadn’t heard at all.

Between the Heiligenstadt Testament and the Ninth, though, were more than 20 years of

deterioration. One theory is that his hearing loss affected higher frequencies first. The deaf

composer Lloyd Coleman, who has written a Beethoven-inspired score for a new Radio 3
play Beethoven Can Hear You, which stars Peter Capaldi as the composer and the deaf actress

Sophie Stone as a time traveller who visits him, wonders if Beethoven’s compositional palette

was a response to his deafness. “Some of those piano sonatas use the extremities of the keyboard

— Beethoven was finding sounds that were shocking, harsh and abrasive. I wonder if he was

drawn to those sounds because he didn’t hear them the way other composers did.” Nicholas
Collon, who will pair Ayres’s No 52 with the Seventh Symphony, describes the symphony as

“probably the most joyous, jubilant music he wrote. It’s also very loud — very much into your

body. You could claim he needs to do that because he wants to feel the frequencies.”

This is, however, speculation. And the Beethoven industry always has more speculation to offer.

This year a musicologist at Kent State University, Ohio, proposed that Beethoven was not
totally deaf, even shortly before his death. His findings followed close analysis of Beethoven’s

“conversation books”, blank little notebooks the composer carried around so that friends could