Joyce Maier wrote:

>Have you read Solomon's "Beethoven Essays", published in 1988 and a
>continuation of his biography? If not, please do.  You'll stumble over
>Freud on almost every page.  The most amazing essay is the essay devoted
>to Beethoven's dreams, though, also a flabbergasting one, is his attempt
>to "explain" Beethoven's deafness, connecting it to Beethoven's fear for
>"being no longer a man." Ears, writes Solomon are a symbol of the male
>genitals.  Hm.

Well in the Japanese film, *Kwaidan*, in which the music is by the late
Toru Takemitsu, one of the ghost tales is of "Earless Hoichi", a blind
singer threatened by evil spirits, against which he is protected by holy
texts written all over his body by the monks, so as to render him invisible
to his pursuers.  Unfortunately, they forgot to write on his ears, which
the spirits seize and yank off.  I always wondered whether those ears
weren't actually a "sanitized" substitute for another part of the singer's
anatomy.

Walter Meyer