Which composer became deaf but kept writing music?

Beethoven, whose hearing began to fail in his late twenties - at the height of his early success - and was effectively gone by his mid-forties. He wrote about it in 1802 in a letter to his brothers that he never sent, found among his papers after his death, in which he describes the humiliation of having to ask people to shout and says he had considered ending his life and was held back by his work.

He kept composing for another twenty-five years, and the late works are the ones musicians treat with the most awe - the last quartets, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony. He is said to have sawn the legs off a piano to feel the vibration through the floor, and by the end conversation happened through notebooks, hundreds of which survive and give an unusually direct record of a composer's daily life.

At the premiere of the Ninth in 1824 he stood beside the conductor setting tempi he could not hear. When it finished he was still turned towards the orchestra, and one of the singers took his arm and turned him round so he could see the audience applauding. What caused the deafness has never been established - lead poisoning, typhus, an autoimmune condition and otosclerosis have all been argued from his hair, his skull and his symptoms.