Why could Beethoven compose really good music despite being deaf?
I can’t promise that you will do as well as Beethoven, but if you take an ear training course, you will be able to write music without fishing around on a keyboard. If Mozart went deaf, he would have been able to do comparably well. Mozart composed entire piano concertos while riding in a stagecoach. I read somewhere that Puccini wrote the entire last act of La Boheme at a table where his friends were playing cards. He could have done better along this line, however. When he was composing Madama Butterfly, he had an automobile accident. He had to sit in an easy chair with his leg propped up. That meant he had to postpone work on the opera, because he couldn’t sit at the keyboard and fish for notes and chords. At the opposite extreme is the Russian composer Cesar Cui. He never took a music theory course, so the only way he could find pleasing chords was to sit at the keyboard and fish. It took him ten years to compose an opera which a well-trained composer could have written in a fracti
