Maelzel, Beethoven’s Friend Inventor

With obedient confidence Beethoven applied himself to follow the various prescriptions of the doctors he consulted [without any improvement] (…) Disillusioned, disheartened, he had to put between himself and the world those ear trumpets of different forms that Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome, was building for him. And, finally, in his last twenty years he had to reduce his communication with the living to a few humble notebooks of ruled paper…

Excerpt from an article by A. Furno on Beethoven’s deafness, published in Musicografía, August 1933.

This 2020 is the year in which we remember that 250 years ago, in 1770, one of the greatest geniuses in the history of music was born in the German city of Bonn: Ludwig van Beethoven. The “deaf genius” changed Western music forever and its echoes accompany us everywhere. But it is not his great work that concerns us here, but an aspect of his life that is less well remembered but really curious. The deafness, among other illnesses, which afflicted Beethoven until he lost his hearing completely, has always been a subject of debate. Would he have composed any of his last genius works if he had kept his senses in top form? That misfortune left us with the image of a Beethoven locked up in himself, creating a whole revolutionary universe of sound, unique and amazing, in the midst of the most deafening silence. But in the misfortune, as a desperate attempt to maintain access to the world of sound, the genius of Bonn allied himself with a singular character, an adventurer named Johann Nepomuk Maelzel.

Maelzel (also written as Mälzel), inventor and showman in equal parts, was born in Regensburg in 1772. He was the son of an organ builder, which certainly led him to indulge his two great passions: music and machines. With a great musical education, he decided to try his luck in Vienna by working in the maintenance of musical instruments of all kinds. And, among organs and harpsichords, the imaginative Johann thought that he could invent new instruments with which to build the music of the future.

His first success was a variant of the Orchestrion, or what amounts to the same thing: a machine that plays sounds as if it were an orchestra or a music band. We are now in the last decade of the 18th century, when music boxes and mechanical automatons are causing real admiration. Among the wealthy people, these devices were valued and treated like jewels. In this environment, a good Orchestrion was something that…