As a musicologist, Dr. Robin Wallace has devoted much of his career to studying Beethoven.

Then his wife, Barbara, went deaf.

In this episode of Classically Speaking, Wallace disusses how Barbara’s adjustments to deafness lead him to new insights and inspired his latest book,
Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery. In it, Wallace busts some major Beethoven myths and challenges some of the conventional ways the hearing world thinks about the composer’s deafness.

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.