Nevertheless music/the arts is one really good reason to live in Europe.
The arts, yes. Music, no.
Beethoven, I'm sure, would have appreciated our current ability to wind the volume up. His deafness was almost total towards the end, and he spent a good deal of time and even more money trying to develop louder pianos. He succeeded in his career by dint of some clever self-marketing, but he wouldn't have succeeded, regardless, had he not been a true genius. I've read a couple of biographies and that seems to be about all they agree on.
I doubt, though, if any of today's little musical wiggin-wonders would be able to achieve, deaf, what he managed to.
Trying to guess what might have happened had various long-dead people been alive today is one of the less fruitful exercises one can waste one's time on.
