oems by
Matthisson and Seume, and Nina d'Aubigny's "Letters to Natalia on
Singing,"--a book to which Beethoven attached great value. These books
have disappeared, as well as others which Beethoven valued. We do
not know what became of the volumes of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and
Xenophon, or the writings of Pliny, Euripides, Quintilian, Ovid, Horace,
Ossian, Milton and Thomson, traces of which are found in Beethoven's
utterances.

The catalogue made for the auction sale of his posthumous effects on
September 7, 1827, included forty-four works of which the censorship
seized five as prohibited writings, namely, Seume's "Foot Journey to
Syracuse," the Apocrypha, Kotzebue's "On the Nobility," W.E.
Muller's "Paris in its Zenith" (1816), and "Views on Religion and
Ecclesiasticism." Burney's "General History of Music" was also in his
library, the gift, probably of an English admirer.

In his later years Beethoven was obliged to use the oft-quoted
"conversation-books" in his intercourse with friends and strangers
alike who wrote down their questions. Of these little books Schindler
preserved no less than 134, which are now in the Royal Library in
Berlin. Naturally Beethoven answered the written questions orally as a
rule. An idea of Beethoven's opinions can occasionally be gathered from
the context of the questions, but frequently we are left in the dark.

Beethoven's own characterization of his deafness as "singular" is
significant. Often, even in his later years, he was able to hear a
little and for a time. One might almost speak of a periodical visitation
of the "demon." In his biography Marx gives the following description
of the malady: "As early as 1816 it is found that he is incapable
of conducting his own works; in 1824 he could not hear the storm
of applause from a great audience; but in 1822 he still improvises
marvelously in social circles; in 1826 he studies their parts in the
Ninth Symphony and Solemn Mass with Sontag and Ungher, and in 1825 he
listens critically to a performance of the quartet in A-minor, op. 132."

It is to be assumed that in such urgent cases his willpower temporarily
gave new tension to the gradually atrophying aural nerves (it is said
that he was still able to hear single or a few voices with his left
ear but could not apprehend masses), but this was not the case in less
important moments, as the conversation-books prove. In these books a few
answers are also written down, naturally