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 [log in to unmask]