Ludwig Van, You’re On!

(The curtain rises on a Vienna salon, 1805. The air is thick with unsniffed snuff and un-sung high notes. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, a man whose scowl is already holding a difficult fourth inversion, is backed into a corner by a man holding a libretto like a soiled baby.)

Our hero, already the most famous composer in a city whose primary export is composers, was in a bind. Not a musical one—he could resolve a chord progression from three rooms away with both hands tied behind his back. This was a social bind, which for Beethoven was the only truly terrifying key signature. The slick and entirely talent-free Count Ferdinand Palffy, a man who owned two of Vienna’s major theatres and precisely zero discerning ears, had decided that he, Palffy, was an undiscovered master of *opera buffa*. And he had decided that Ludwig van Beethoven, a man who conducted negotiations with God on a daily basis via his piano, would be the star of his debut production, *The Amorous Potato-Seller of Schönbrunn*.

Beethoven, upon reading the first page, immediately understood the stakes. The plot involved a magic sack of potatoes, a cross-dressing Archduchess, and a seven-minute aria about the proper way to boil a tuber. It wasn’t just bad. It was a structural threat to the very concept of music. A direct refusal was impossible; Palffy was his landlord and held the leases to the Theater an der Wien and the Kärntnertor Theater, the city’s two best venues. Burning the manuscript would only result in Palffy producing another, possibly worse one. There was only one way out: a strategic retreat so total, so absolute, that no one would ever ask him to sing about vegetables again.

He began small. An ear trumpet appeared at rehearsals, wielded less as an aid and more as a weapon, a brass truncheon to bat away unwanted conversations. He started asking people to write things down, complaining of a “wretched buzzing.” The pièce de résistance was the dress rehearsal. Beethoven, in the title role, was meant to sing a duet with a prize-winning pig. Instead, he simply stood there, a tragic monument to silence, occasionally striking a single, devastatingly loud C-sharp on a nearby harpsichord. He’d stare into the wings with the desperate gaze of a man trying to hear a pin drop in a hurricane, shaking his head with profound, telegraphed sorrow. The cast, horrified and confused, ground to a halt. Palffy, weeping, declared the production cursed. It was the greatest performance of Beethoven’s life.

The ruse, however, took on a life of its own. What began as a six-week gambit to dodge a bad opera became a lifelong career move. It was just too useful. Unwanted commissions? “So sorry, I can’t hear your deadline.” A terrible soprano? A shrug of magnificent, symphonic ignorance. Tedious chitchat at a party? He’d just gesture tragically at his ear and retreat to the buffet. He composed the Ninth Symphony not as a defiant roar against the dying of the light, but as the ultimate act of not having to listen to anyone else’s opinion ever again. The final review is in: for his masterful, decades-long performance of ‘Deaf Genius,’ we must award Ludwig van Beethoven five stars. The opera itself, we are forced to note, remains un-staged.