Deaf and blind composers and how they wrote music

Many composers wrote music without hearing or without sight. Beethoven and Smetana wrote some of their best-known pieces after they went deaf. Joaquín Rodrigo, blind from the age of three, wrote a guitar concerto that is played around the world. This page lists who they were and explains how they worked.

Composers who lost their hearing

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 to 1827). His hearing began to fade at about 27. In his last years, he could hear almost nothing. He wrote his Ninth Symphony in those years. Read was Beethoven deaf?

Bedřich Smetana (1824 to 1884). The Czech composer went deaf within a few months, at 50. He then wrote The Moldau, his piece about a river, and never heard it played. Read Smetana for kids.

Gabriel Fauré (1845 to 1924). The French composer began to lose his hearing in his late fifties. Sounds also became distorted for him, so that high notes and low notes seemed out of tune. He kept writing into his late seventies. Read Fauré for kids.

Ethel Smyth (1858 to 1944). The English composer began to lose her hearing in her fifties. She turned more and more to writing books about her life. Read Ethel Smyth for kids.

A deaf musician of today

Evelyn Glennie is a Scottish percussion player who was born in 1965. She has been deaf since she was 12. She plays without shoes, so that she can feel the sound through the floor and through her body. She performs as a soloist with orchestras around the world.

Composers who were blind

Francesco Landini (about 1325 to 1397). He lost his sight as a child after an illness. He became the best-known composer in Italy in the 1300s. He played a small organ that sat on his lap.

Antonio de Cabezón (1510 to 1566). Blind from childhood, he was the organist to the royal family of Spain. He traveled across Europe with the king.

John Stanley (1712 to 1786). He lost his sight in an accident at two. He was a church organist in London by 11. Late in life, he became the master of the king’s musicians.

Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 to 1824). She lost her sight as a small child in Vienna. She became a pianist, a singer, and a composer, and she toured to Paris and London. Mozart is thought to have written a piano concerto for her. She composed on a board with pegs that stood for notes. Later she opened a music school.

Joaquín Rodrigo (1901 to 1999). The Spanish composer lost his sight at three after an illness. He wrote his music in braille and then read it out, note by note, to a helper who wrote it down. His Concierto de Aranjuez, for guitar and orchestra, dates from 1939.

Composers who lost their sight late in life

Johann Sebastian Bach went blind in his last year. Read Bach for kids.

George Frideric Handel was blind for the last years of his life. He went on playing the organ in public from memory. Read Handel for kids.

Frederick Delius, an English composer, became blind and unable to move his hands. A young musician named Eric Fenby came to live with him. Delius sang and called out the notes, and Fenby wrote them down.

How they did it

Hearing in the mind. A trained musician can read a page of notes and hear it without a sound. The same skill works the other way. A composer can think of music and write it down. Beethoven, Smetana, and Fauré all relied on this.

Memory. Blind players learned every piece by heart. Stanley and Paradis were known for it.

Dictation. Rodrigo and Delius spoke or sang their music to a helper.

Braille music. Louis Braille, who invented the system of raised dots for reading, was a musician himself. He played the organ and the cello. His system has had a way to write music from the start, and blind musicians use it today.

Touch. Sound makes things shake. A deaf musician can feel that shaking through the hands, the feet, and the chest.

Things to do together

Hear it in your head. Think of a song you know without making a sound. Stop partway. Sing the next note out loud.

Play with eyes closed. On a piano or keyboard, find the groups of two and three black keys by touch alone. Find a C that way.

Feel a sound. Rest your hand on a speaker, a drum, or the side of a piano while music plays.

Take dictation. One person hums a tune of five notes. The other draws its shape on paper as a line that goes up and down.

Listen. Play The Moldau by Smetana and the slow movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo.

Print and play

Print the composer cards and make a new card for one composer on this page. See when each one lived on the composer timeline.

For more composers by era, see classical composers for kids.