And yet, Beethoven had plenty of self-esteem.

A well-known tale that pops in almost every biography goes like this: While playing a private piano recital for one of his royal patrons, Beethoven happened to glance at the audience and noticed a certain Count Palffy chatting with a woman, paying no attention to the music. Beethoven stopped playing, slammed his fists on the keyboard, shouted at the audience "I won't play for swine!" and stormed out.

And in The Letters of Ludwig Van Beethoven, there is one to his patron Prince Lichnowsky, in which he wrote: "Prince, what you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven."

https://www.wrti.org/arts-desk/2020-12-15/these-are-the-quirks-about-beethoven-you-may-not-know

Transcendence Through Sound: The Healing Power of Beethoven’s Ninth
What I Learned About Joy, Grief, and Healing Through Sound

It begins almost shyly. A quiet pulse, like a heartbeat awakening. Then the voices rise—human voices, real voices—and suddenly we’re no longer alone in the music. The sound lifts. It becomes radiant. It becomes spiritual. Joy, here, is not a fleeting emotion—it’s transcendence. It’s unity. It’s the sound of a soul unchained, rising beyond pain, beyond limitation, beyond time.

Beethoven composed his 9th symphony while nearly completely deaf. That alone is astonishing. But what moves me most is that he seemed to hear something we still struggle to grasp: that joy is not the opposite of suffering—it is what makes it bearable. That in silence, there can be beginnings. And that music, when it is this true, can open a door to something sacred.

https://medium.com/@velmchugh/transcendence-through-sound-the-healing-power-of-beethovens-ninth-45bb5f4e19db