Beethoven has taught me to overcome life's challenges

Newsreader John Suchet has been fascinated with the great composer since his teen years, and reveals why his latest book on him will be his eighth and his most personal yet

- John Suchet

Can you remember when you first heard a piece of music by Beethoven? That last question I can certainly answer. I was 17, on a school trip to Vienna, and on the final night our teacher had secured seats at the Vienna State Opera, up in the gods, to see Beethoven's opera Fidelio. I remember the overture's opening flourish, followed by thunderous applause and cries of “Bravo!” I had slept through the whole thing.

A mere 23 years later, I was an ITN reporter on a midnight ferry from Limassol in Cyprus to Beirut to join my camera crew to cover the Lebanese civil war. In my pocket, a battered Walkman and a single cassette tape, Beethoven’s Symphony No 3 (Eroica).

In the dead of night, salt water spray blowing into my face, the red glow of war in the distance - and I was steaming towards it – I blew the Eroica into my head.

Those massive opening chords, the whiplash of the repeated discords, the lone horn entry in the “wrong” place; the funeral march of the second movement, the skittishness of the third, and the ultimate triumph of the final movement. Or, to put it another way, a life confronted by one problem after another - difficult childhood, always the outsider, loneliness, failed relationships – just like you and me, and every other human being.

But Beethoven had one other blow he had to contend with, the one sense that in him should be more acute than any other, the one sense essential to his calling, the reason for his existence: his hearing. And it was failing, and he knew it would continue to worsen until he was completely deaf. What, he felt, was the point of living if he could no longer hear his own music?