Tonight I saw a miracle, and it left me in tears.

When I was sixteen I started having dizzy spells and fainting. My ears rang and rang. I already wore hearing aids, but something was wrong. Seventeen; I’ve been in an arts magnet program for music for three years and wanted to be a performer badly. But then I was diagnosed with a degenerative hearing loss on top of being born hearing impaired. I was told I would likely be deaf by the time I’m forty. I was devastated, but after reading Beethoven’s letter known as the Heiligenstadt Testament I decided to try my best to keep going.

Well, it was my thirty-ninth birthday this week, much of which I’ve been lucky to spend in my first concert series back with Master Chorale of Tampa Bay since the pandemic started. While I am legally deaf I am lucky: I have hearing aids that greatly help me continue to communicate, to hear and sing. What were we singing? I’m glad you asked: A concert all about Beethoven.

First, we performed a peice about Beethoven’s famous aforementioned letter to his brothers where he laments his hearing loss, set to an entirely perceptive and emotional work “A Silence Haunts Me” by Jake Runestad. He talks about the church bells he can’t hear, and I remember the first time I sat on the beach and realized I couldn’t hear the waves anymore. The desperate clamoring on the keys isn’t the accompianist Dr. Rodney Shores having a bad I-forgot-how-to-piano day but sounds rather similar to when I want to sight-read on my keyboard before I’ve had my coffee and put my hearing aids in. The pleading, the trembling and asking of why, not dissimilar to the one I certainly asked as well. And I’m not anywhere cloooooooose to the scope of what Beethoven’s abilities were and if I was devastated, I cannot even imagine how absolutely crushed he must’ve been.

Hearing loss is an invisible disability in that we are often ridiculed or misunderstood. Especially in Beethoven’s time. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it is easy. So to see people leap up to their feet tonight as soon as Beethoven’s Ninth ended, applauding and cheering with such enthusiasm for a piece written by someone who was deaf… I started crying, and I’m crying as I write this. Because even if you don’t know much about Beethoven, everyone knows he couldn’t hear but still wrote such powerful and passionate (not for you, Napoleon) music. It’s just really wonderful to see hundreds of people appreciate that. Even if it was just for a moment before they go back to the parking garage to be stuck for twenty minutes and then return to their homes and lives - this guy wrote this piece two hundred years ago that people are still talking about.

I wish I could tell them what he might’ve heard, if he was there. If he heard anything at all at the conclusion of this premiere back in his time, it would sound something like a distant rumble of hums of percussion above water and he was in it. Maybe just the vibrations from the applause with no actual pitch to it, which would explain why he had to be notified of the audience’s reaction. But as I said (in my goofy manner, but with every bit of truth to it), my favorite part of the concert would be the end of “A Silence Haunts Me”. For a minute, the audience gets to hear like Beethoven. Like me. Like the entire deaf and hard of hearing community. The notes fade away but the choir is still singing - but there’s nothing to be heard. In a time where we live in social distancing, covered faces, isolation and more it’s important to find the times we are all united. In that moment everyone in the room was together, experiencing firsthand a small miracle. For one minute, Jake Runestad, Master Chorale, Brett Karlin and the opportunity granted by The Florida Orchestra all made the invisible disability, -visible-.

I think back to the time I went to Vienna, Austria in my twenties and visited Beethoven’s grave. It was quiet, and his prominent site was among many of the greats in a spot dubbed “Musician’s Row”. There, I wrote a single word on a bit of paper and tucked it into the flowers I laid on his grave.
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“Danke.” (Thanks.)

Button above links to The Florida Orchestra

• Friday, January 28 - 8:00 PM - Straz Center, Tampa
• Saturday, January 29 - 8:00 PM - Mahaffey Theater, St. Pete
• ​Sunday, January 30 - 7:30 PM - Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater

​Health and Safety
Face masks are required in all concert venues, regardless of vaccination status.
The Straz Center has additional requirements related to performances at their hall. For full details, click here.

In 2017, Jake Runestad travelled to Leipzig, Germany to be present at the premiere of Into the Light, an extended work for chorus and orchestra commissioned by Valparaiso University to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his Ninety-Seven Theses to a door in Wittenberg, thereby kicking off the Reformation. While traveling after the concert, Runestad found himself in the Haus der Musik Museum in Vienna, where he encountered a facsimile of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament.

It was the first time he had read the famous text, which is almost equal parts medical history (including Beethoven’s first admission to his brothers that he was going deaf), last will and testament, suicide note, letter of forgiveness, and prayer of hope. Runestad was flabbergasted and found himself thinking about Beethoven, about loss, and about the tragedy of one of the greatest musicians of all time losing his hearing. Beethoven put it this way, “Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.”

When the American Choral Directors Association offered the Raymond C. Brock Commission to Runestad for the 2019 National Conference, he took many months to settle on a topic, finally deciding on setting Beethoven’s words. While researching Beethoven’s output around the time of the letter, Runestad discovered that Beethoven wrote a ballet, Creatures of Prometheus, just a year before penning his testament. “Beethoven must have put himself into Prometheus’ mindset to embody the story,” Runestad noted. “Just as Prometheus gifted humankind with fire and was punished for eternity, so did Beethoven gift the fire of his music while fighting his deafness, an impending silence. What an absolutely devastating yet inspiring account of the power of the human spirit. In the moment of his loss —when he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament — he had no idea how profound his legacy would be” (“legacy” being one of the themes of this ACDA’s anniversary conference).

Because of the length of the letter, a verbatim setting was impractical; Runestad once again turned to his friend and frequent collaborator, Todd Boss, to help. Boss’s poem, entitled A Silence Haunts Me – After Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament creates a scena — a monologue in Beethoven’s voice for choir. The poem is both familiar and intimate; Boss has taken the fundamentals of Beethoven’s letter and spun it into a libretto that places the reader/listener into the same small, rented room as one of the most towering figures of the Romantic Era.

To those words, Runestad has brought his full array of dramatic understanding and compositional skill; A Silence Haunts Me sounds more like a self-contained monologue from an opera than a traditional choral piece. Runestad, who has published three operas to date, shows his flair for melding music with text even more dramatically than in familiar settings like Let My Love Be Heard and Please Stay. He sets the poetry with an intense, emotional directness and uses some of Beethoven’s own musical ideas to provide context. Stitched into the work are hints at familiar themes from the Moonlight Sonata, the 3rd, 6th, and 9th Symphonies, and Creatures of Prometheus, but they are, in Runestad’s words, “filtered through a hazy, frustrated, and defeated state of being.”

In wrestling with Beethoven, with legacy, and with loss, Runestad has done what he does best—written a score where the poetry creates the form, where the text drives the rhythm, where the melody supports the emotional content, and where the natural sounding vocal lines, arresting harmony, and idiomatic accompaniment — in this case, piano in honor of Beethoven — come together to offer the audience an original, engaging, thoughtful, and passionate work of choral art.
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Program note by Dr. Jonathan Talberg