He couldn't hear a note. The crowd erupted anyway.

Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony in a Viennese court theater on the early evening of May 7, 1824, and could not hear a single note of it. He was almost entirely deaf, wearing an old green frock coat because a friend reasoned the hall would be too dim for anyone to notice. He had fought for this. The finale set Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," a poem he had loved since he was a teenager auditing Kant's lectures at Bonn. No composer before him had woven words into a symphony. His soloists called the parts impossible to sing. Karoline Unger, the nineteen-year-old contralto, told him in his conversation books that he had "too little self-confidence," then wrote "O Obstinacy!" The royal box sat empty when he raised his arms. He was playing for the people. After the last chord, the silence broke into applause, and Beethoven kept conducting, still facing the orchestra.