O God, give me strength to be

victorious over myself

for nothing may chain me to this life.

O guide my spirit,

and raise me from these dark depths,

that my soul,

transported through your wisdom

may fearlessly struggle upward

in fiery flight.

For you alone understand

and can inspire me.

This is the prayer Beethoven wrote on realising that nothing could be done about his deafness. He was 32. Fame was already his but so now was desperate need. Fearing for his career if word spread, Beethoven avoided almost all social gatherings. “It’s impossible for me to say to people 'I am deaf'," he wrote. "In any other profession it would be easier." The painting here by Carl Schweninger of Beethoven under a glowering sky streaked by lightning also hints heavily at the composer’s fearsome internal storms.   

In this prayer, he calls on God for help. First, he prays for strength not to let his deafness define the rest of his life, not to let it ‘chain’ him. Then he prays that God will raise him ‘from these dark depths’. He asks for guidance in channelling his well-attested ‘fiery’ temperament into a fearless struggle ‘upward’, inspiring us too to try - with God’s help - to rise above our difficulties.  The direct simplicity and trust of the prayer’s last sentence is very touching.

Even as his hearing deteriorated, Beethoven’s prayer was answered and he went on to produce many masterpieces, not least his ninth and final symphony. In the excerpt below (Franz Welser-Möst conducting the Vienna Philharmonic), you can hear something Beethoven himself never heard – his rousing setting in the last movement of Schiller’s uplifting Ode to Joy. ‘Joy’, mind you!