Robert Peters <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Hello to everybody!  In a feature on my favourite German classical radio
>program someone said that Beethoven himself saw the cause of his deafness
>in a venereal disease.  Was he right?

Well, Syphilis was so often the cause to the malfunctions that occured
in past century people.  Syphilis can in its differnt stadiums affect the
body it lives in in a great number of ways.  Several composers were also
everything from mad to rotting away from Syphilis.  When Heinrich Heine
portrayed Paganini after a concert in around 1831 he claims that his
jawbone was rotting away from the mercury treatment of Syphilis.  Other
examples are Smetana (who interestingly had similar hearing problems like
Beethoven, what made him mad), likely Robert Schumann(?), and we have Hugo
Wolff.  Even a person living as late as Alexander Glazunow is reported to
have had Syphilis, though the treatment methods were better in his time and
he was cured.  A recent bio claims Peters Aemilius Hartmann got so much
headache from venereal infection, and that he was reposted to have told it
in public probably just increased his headache.

And then we have a "person" in whose suffering the common man of 19th
century probably very easy could identify the loves of flesh deadly stigma
---> Amfortas!

Mats Norrman
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