Biography | Ludwig van Beethoven — The Unsent Letter Written at Probusgasse 6

People treat Beethoven's deafness as a late Vienna fact that arrived with the Ninth. The letter that records the first collapse was written here. Probusgasse 6, then Herrengasse 6, stands in Heiligenstadt, then a village north of the walls. Beethoven came out for the mineral spring from May to October 1802, on the advice of the physician Johann Adam Schmidt. On 6 October 1802 he wrote to his brothers Kaspar Karl and Johann. He described the isolation that followed the failing ear, the thought of ending the life, and the decision not to. A postscript is dated 10 October. He folded the sheet and sealed it. He did not send it. The paper was found in his effects after the death in 1827. The Hamburg State and University Library holds the original. The house on this street is the traditional address. Josef Böck fixed it in 1890. Later work by Walther Brauneis argued that the 1802 wing burned and was rebuilt in 1807, so the rooms a visitor walks are not the rooms of that autumn. Vienna bought the building in 1967. Wien Museum opened a small memorial in 1970 and expanded it in 2017 to a 265-square-metre Beethoven Museum. The village is inside the nineteenth district now. The letter still reads as a man of thirty-one choosing the work over the silence. Photo: Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons