In March 1827 Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in his bed with abdominal pain and jaundice, grieving friends and acquaintances visited him. Can you cut his hair as a souvenir?
Even after Beethoven died at the age of 56, doctors performed a horrific craniotomy to understand why Beethoven lost his hearing, examined the folds of Beethoven’s brain and removed his ear bones. The line of people continued.
Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single hair remained on his head.
Since then, the cottage industry has sought to understand Beethoven’s illness and the cause of his death.
Now, an analysis of his hair has overturned long-held beliefs about his health. It raises new questions about and hints at dark family secrets.
of paperby an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.
It offers an added surprise: The famous lock of hair that is the subject of the book and documentary was not Beethoven’s. It was from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman.
The study found that Beethoven did not have lead poisoning, as was widely believed.neither did he black manas some suggested.
And the Belgian Flemish family who shared the surname Van Beethoven and proudly claimed kinship have no genetic connection to him.
Researchers unrelated to this study found it convincing.
Andaine Seguin-Orlando, an ancient DNA expert at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, said it was “very serious and well-executed research.”
The detective work to unravel the mystery of Beethoven’s illness began on December 1, 1994, when a strand of hair believed to belong to Beethoven was auctioned by Sotheby’s. His four members of the Beethoven Society of America, his private group that collects and preserves material related to the composer, bought it for $7,300. They proudly displayed at Ira F. Brilliant’s Beethoven Research Center at San Jose State University in California.
But was it really Beethoven’s hair?
The story was that it was cut out by Ferdinand Hiller, a 15-year-old composer and avid acolyte who visited Beethoven four times before he died.
The day after Beethoven died, Hiller cut his hair. He gave it to his son decades later as his birthday present. It was kept in a rocket.
Lockets with hair were the subject of Russell Martin’s best-selling book Beethoven’s Hair, published in 2000 and made into a documentary film in 2005.
Ann analysis Lead levels 100 times higher than normal were found in hair at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
In 2007, paper The Beethoven Journal, an academic journal published by San Jose State University, speculates that the composer may have been inadvertently poisoned by drugs, wine, or eating utensils.
The problem wasn’t until 2014, when Tristan Begg, then a master’s student in archeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, realized the science had advanced enough to allow DNA analysis using Beethoven’s hair. It was just as it was.
“It looks like it might be worth a try,” said Begg, who now has a Ph.D. Student at Cambridge University.
Beethoven scholar William Meredith began searching for another strand of Beethoven’s hair, purchasing it at private sales and auctions with financial support from the Beethoven Society of America. He borrowed two more from the university and the museum. He got eight strands of hair, including Ferdinand Hiller’s hair.
First, researchers tested Hiller Rock. She turned out to be from a woman, so it wasn’t Beethoven’s.Analysis also showed that the woman had genes found in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
Dr. Meredith speculates that Beethoven’s real hair was destroyed and replaced with that of Sophie Lyonne, wife of Ferdinand Hiller’s son Paul.
Of the other seven locks, one was not real, five had identical DNA, and one could not be tested. Five hairs with identical DNA came from different origins, and two had an impeccable chain of custody, so researchers were convinced they were Beethoven’s hairs.
Ed Green, an ancient DNA expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study, agreed.
“The fact that there are so many independent hairs with different histories, all matching each other, is compelling evidence that this is Beethoven’s authentic DNA,” he said.
When the group obtained the DNA sequence from Beethoven’s hair, they sought to answer long-standing questions about his health. For example, why did he die of cirrhosis?
Theodore Albrecht, professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio, said he drank, but not too much. Based on a study of texts left by the composer, he explained in an email what is known about Beethoven’s drinking habits.
“In none of these activities did Beethoven cross the threshold of consumption that would make him an ‘alcoholic’ as it is commonly defined today,” he wrote.
Beethoven’s hair provided a clue. He had a genetic mutation in his DNA that predisposed him to liver disease. Additionally, his hair contains traces of his Hepatitis B DNA, indicating that he is infected with this virus that can destroy a person’s liver.
But how did Beethoven get it? Hepatitis B is transmitted through sexual intercourse, needle sharing, and childbirth.
According to Dr. Meredith, Beethoven did not use intravenous drugs. Although he was romantically interested in several women, he never married. He also wrote a letter to his “immortal darling”, although he never sent it. Details of his sex life remain unknown.
Arthur Kotcher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and one of the co-authors of the new study, offered another possible explanation for his infection. You may have contracted hepatitis B. The virus is commonly spread in this way, and an infected baby can develop a chronic infection that can last a lifetime. typically lead to cirrhosis or liver cancer.
“Someone may eventually die of liver failure,” he said.
The study also revealed that Beethoven was not genetically related to anyone else in his family line. It was different from that of a group of five people with the same last name — Van Beethoven — who shared the same surname. This indicates that there was an extramarital affair in Beethoven’s direct paternal line. But where?
Maarten Larmceau, co-author of the new study and professor of genetic genealogy at Belgium’s University of Leuven, said Ludwig van Beethoven’s father was not born to a man other than the composer’s grandmother and grandfather. There is no baptismal record for Beethoven’s father, and it is known that his grandmother was an alcoholic. Beethoven’s grandfather and father had a difficult relationship. According to Dr. Larmceau, these factors can be signs of having children out of wedlock.
According to Dr. Meredith, Beethoven had problems with his father. And although his grandfather, who was a prominent court musician at the time, died when Beethoven was very young, he honored his grandfather and kept his portrait in his possession until the day he died.
Dr. Meredith added that when rumors spread that Beethoven was in fact Friedrich Wilhelm II or the illegitimate son of Frederick II, Beethoven never disputed them.
Researchers hoped that a study of Beethoven’s hair might explain some of Beethoven’s agonizing health problems.
The composer suffered from severe digestive problems, including abdominal pain and prolonged bouts of diarrhea. Although the DNA analysis did not point to a cause, it nearly ruled out two suggested reasons: celiac disease and ulcerative colitis, which led to his third hypothesis, irritable bowel syndrome. made less likely.
Hepatitis B may have been the cause, Dr. Kocher said, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
DNA analysis also did not explain Beethoven’s deafness, which began in his mid-twenties and became deaf in the last decade of his life.
The researchers took pains to discuss their results beforehand with the people directly affected by their research.
On the night of March 15th, Dr. Larmceau met five people in Belgium with the surname Van Beethoven who donated their DNA for research.
He immediately started with the bad news: they are not genetically related to Ludwig van Beethoven.
they were shocked.
“They didn’t know how to react,” said Dr. Larmceau. “Every day they are remembered by a special surname. Every day they say their name and people say, ‘Are you related to Ludwig van Beethoven?'”
That relationship “is part of their identity,” Dr. Lamuseau said.
And now it’s gone.
The finding that Hiller’s hair belonged to a Jewish woman surprised Martin, author of “Beethoven’s Hair.”
“Wow, who would have imagined,” he said. Now, he adds, he wants to find a descendant of Paul Hiller’s wife, Sophie Lyon, to see if her hair is hers, and to find out if she had lead poisoning. I think.
For Dr. Meredith, this project was a great adventure.
“The whole complicated story is amazing to me,” he said. “And I’ve been with him since 1994. One discovery just leads to another unexpected discovery.”
