The violinist Nigel Kennedy has said that he experienced partial deafness for about three months after having the third Covid vaccine in 2021.
“I wasn’t in a fit state to play concerts,” he said, recalling that his hearing loss coincided with the trauma of breaking the little finger of his left hand while trying to control his large dog.
Kennedy is the bestselling classical violinist of all time, breaking records with his Vivaldi’s Four Seasons recording and overcoming barriers, particularly with young people, through performances of everything from classical music to jazz and rock.
But, after his hearing loss, he said he had to confront the prospect of being unable to perform professionally again.
He said: “I didn’t want to play with colleagues while I was playing out of tune.”
He cannot be certain that the Covid jab was to blame, but said he knew of another musician who had similarly lost his hearing.
A further symptom that Kennedy experienced was extreme fatigue, he said. “I turned into a zombie … I’d be nodding off, whatever I was doing … I’d wake up and think: ‘thank God I haven’t dropped the violin’, if I’d had it in my hand … That’s something which had never happened to me before.”
His hearing loss was “more to do with the overtones and the intonation” than the volume level, he said.
With sheer perseverance, he trained himself to hear “the overtones and the undertones of notes” again. “I was able to work on my intonation and get my hearing back. Maybe if I wasn’t a musician I wouldn’t really have got the hearing back because, in music, you’re teaching yourself to listen all the time.
“I built it from the ground upwards again, but I think now I’ve got a better intonation than I had before … If you’re faced by a dilemma like that, you can’t really panic about it because all you can do is the best to overcome the problem.”
Asked about his reluctance to discuss the hearing loss until now, he said: “I wanted to make sure that I really was playing in tune before I came out with it … It was a sensitive issue and I didn’t want everyone coming to my concert thinking ‘[he’s] playing out of tune’.”
He added: “I don’t mind people knowing now, because I’m playing right bang in the middle of the notes … It’s all right now. I don’t think anyone could really fault my intonation. I think it’s much better than it was before.
“There might be some other musicians who suffered from the same thing … It’s beyond just musicians. If you’re suddenly feeling like you’re catatonic at four o’clock every day, I’m sure that’s happened to a lot of people.”
He was speaking before his “Concert for peace, acceptance and forgiveness” with the vocalist and composer Cleveland Watkiss, among others, on 29 January at the Barbican in London. It will include music that they are writing together.
He said that its theme was a response to “all the negative stories that one sees everywhere” and his dismay that, even when some people tried to take positive action, they were too often “only looking after their own very narrow demographic”.
He said musicians did not think that way and that that musical performance was “a collaboration between all of us”.
“If there’s a problem, we need to solve it as human beings together, not as a tiny split-definition of what our species is. We’re all the same people.”
