On a stormy Monday in March 1827, German composer Ludwig van Beethoven died after a long illness.
He has been bedridden since last Christmas, suffering from jaundice that left his limbs and abdomen swollen and making every breath difficult.
As his colleagues were sorting through personal belongings, they discovered a document Beethoven had written a quarter-century earlier – a will imploring his brother to make details of his illness public.
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Today, it’s no secret that one of the world’s greatest musicians suffered from functional deafness in his 40s.
This is the tragic irony that Beethoven wanted the world to understand, not only from a personal perspective, but also from a medical perspective.
The composer outlived his doctors by nearly two decades, but nearly two centuries after Beethoven’s death, a team of researchers set out to fulfill his legacy in a way he never dreamed of by performing genetic analysis of DNA from real samples of his hair.
Watch the video below for a summary of the research:
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“Our main goal was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, which are known to have included progressive hearing loss that began in his 20s and eventually led to his functional deafness in 1818,” biochemist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany explained in a press statement when the 2023 results were announced.
The primary cause of hearing loss was unknown, even to his personal physician, Dr. John Adam Schmidt.
He began experiencing tinnitus in his 20s, which slowly turned into a reduced tolerance for loud noises and eventually the loss of his hearing for high notes, effectively ending his career as a performing artist.
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For a musician, there’s nothing more ironic than that. In a letter to his brother, Beethoven admitted that he was “hopelessly tortured” and even contemplated suicide.
It was not just hearing loss that the composer had to deal with in his adult life. He is said to have suffered from severe abdominal pain and chronic diarrhea since at least the age of 22.
Six years before his death, signs of liver disease first appeared, and the disease is thought to have contributed, at least in part, to his death at the relatively young age of 56.
In 2007, a forensic investigation of a lock of hair believed to belong to Beethoven suggested that lead poisoning may have hastened his death, if not the ultimate cause of the symptoms that led to his death.
This conclusion is not surprising given the culture of drinking from lead containers and the medical practices of the time that involved the use of lead.
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However, this latest study, published in March 2023, debunks this theory, revealing that the hairs did not originally come from Beethoven, but from an unknown woman.
What’s more, it turns out that several of the locks were more likely to have come from the composer’s head, suggesting that his death may have been caused by a hepatitis B infection that was exacerbated by his drinking and numerous risk factors for liver disease.
“We can’t say exactly what killed Beethoven, but we can now at least confirm that there is a significant genetic risk, as well as hepatitis B virus infection,” Kraus explains.
“We can also eliminate several other less plausible genetic causes.”
As for his other conditions?
“We were unable to find a clear cause of Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems,” Kraus said.
A lock of Beethoven’s actual hair, affixed to a letter dated 1827, photographed in 2018 by Kevin Brown, a member of the American Beethoven Society. (Begg et al., current. biology.2023)
In some ways, we are left with more questions about the life and death of this famous classical composer.
Where did he contract hepatitis? How did a lock of women’s hair come to be passed off as Beethoven’s own hair over the centuries? What’s behind his intestinal pain and hearing loss?
This is an unfortunate outcome given that the team was inspired by Beethoven’s desire for the world to understand his hearing loss. But there was another surprise buried in his genes.
Further studies comparing the Y chromosomes in the hair samples to those of modern relatives of Beethoven’s paternal descendants revealed a mismatch.
This suggests that extramarital sex was practiced in generations before the composer was born.
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Tristan Begg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said: “This discovery suggests that there were additional paternity events in the paternal line between Hendrik van Beethoven’s conception in Campenhout, Belgium, around 1572, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s conception seven generations later in Bonn, Germany, in 1770.”
It may all be a little more than the young Beethoven expected, given the decisive demands he put down on paper.
He never dreamed that on that dark and stormy Monday night in 1827, when his friends and colleagues cut the hair off his body, these secrets would be preserved.
This research was published in modern biology.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2023.
