Walter Meyer wrote, in response to me:

>>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.

Well, obviously you're an excellent pupil of Freud.:-) Solomon's thoughts
on the background are, of course, Freud's digressions on Oedipus, in whose
case the substitute were not his ears, but his eyes.  Believe it or not...
But I don't think that long digressions on the (lack of) merits of Freud's
theories belong on this list, so let's put that aside.  However, what I
tried to say is that Solomon, who takes Freud very seriously, is very eager
to find typically Freudian defined causes in everything what happened to
Beethoven.  The crux in his digressions on the deafness is that at least
partially it was not a physical disease, but something psychosomatic.  It
was Beethoven's "task" to become deaf.  He "needed" his deafness.  It was
an initiation rite to become a composer, but, alas, alas, he had to pay a
price and quite a high one.  Behind the deafness there's impotence, at
least on an emotional level, but maybe also physical, at least more or
less.  Here Solomon is heavily leaning on the Sterbas and their attempt
to put Beethoven on the couch of the psychiatrist.  The Sterbas had been
Freud's pupils, but, being also Jews, they left Europe and moved to the
USA.  There they wrote their amazing book "Beethoven and his nephew.  A
psychoanalytical study of their relationship", published in the fifties.
They think that actually Beethoven had been more or less impotent with
women, because actually he had been a homosexual who had been unable to
come out of the closet.  They saw a row of men in Beethoven's life, with
whom he had been in love, though probably on an unconscious level.  He
started with his friend Malchus, moved over to his brother Caspar Anton
Carl and finally put all his emotional needs on Caspar Anton Carl's son.
In such a state of mind there was no room for a (healthy and normal
relationship with) a woman.  According to the Sterbas that's the background
of that famous love letter.  Partly Solomon obviously on their side.

Joyce Maier
www.ademu.com/Beethoven

[When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.  -Dave]