The Reason to Stay
In May 1802, Dr. Johann Adam Schmidt sent Ludwig van Beethoven out of Vienna to the country village of Heiligenstadt. The doctor thought quiet air would rest the composer's ears and halt his hearing loss. It did not. Beethoven stayed in rented rooms on Probusgasse through the summer and realized his hearing was gone for good. He was thirty-one years old. He had hidden the damage from his friends for six years because a deaf composer risked ridicule and poverty. On 6 October 1802, alone in his room, he sat down and wrote a private letter to his brothers.
The letter explains that he had reached the verge of suicide and names what pulled him back. He wrote, "only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce". This was not a sudden burst of good cheer or self-regard. He felt he owed the public music that existed only in his head, and dying early would leave that debt unpaid. A person stays at their desk through sickness or failure because nobody else can finish their specific assignment. He packed his papers and went back to Vienna to write the Third Symphony.
Therefore
When you feel like giving up, list the tasks that only you can finish. The duty to make what is unmade will keep you moving when your mood will not.
The Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802
Beethoven addressed the pages to his brother Carl and left a blank space where his brother Johann's name belonged. He asked them to let Dr. Schmidt tell the public about his illness after his death, so people would understand why he kept to himself. Beethoven never mailed the letter. He sealed the sheets in a drawer and kept them for twenty-five years while writing almost all the music he is known for today. By the premiere of the Ninth Symphony in 1824, he could not hear the audience and had to be turned around to see them clapping. Anton Schindler found the document among Beethoven's papers after he died in 1827. It now sits in the Hamburg State Library.
A small reminder, on the desk or piano, that your unmade work is an obligation worth staying alive to finish.
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