Beethoven was deaf

For a long time I had pillaged all the books for the respectable hard facts: names, dates, places, words of songs, opus numbers. The authorities spit out these facts time after time and arrange them like so many cherry-stones around an empty plate. Time spent unearthing these things in libraries, compiling endless lists, tended paradoxically to cast doubt on what I thought I knew at the start. Writing about music appeared to involve an oath to connect nothing, to question nothing and to disturb nothing. I began to query my own r