Get ready for the performance with Georg

The two respective Ninth Symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven and Dimitri Shostakovich have long had the unenviable task of representing monuments to the persistence of the human spirit in the face of adversity. By the year 1814, Beethoven had become profoundly deaf, unable to perform in public, unable to hear music, and unable to talk with friends except by means of conversation books, in which his friends would enter their questions and comments. This silence, which had slowly enveloped the composer beginning in the late 1790’s, halted the enormous productivity of his heroic period...

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