“What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing! Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair. Little more, and I would have put an end to my life—it was only my art that held me back.” —
from Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, an unsent letter to his brothers written in 1802 while he sought treatment in the village of Heiligenstadt.
