On a stormy Monday in March 1827, the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven died after a long illness.
Bedridden since the previous Christmas, he was ravaged by jaundice, his limbs and abdomen swollen and every breath a struggle.
While his associates are shipping the personal belongings, they discover a document that Beethoven wrote a quarter of a century earlier – a testament in which he asks his brothers to make public details of his condition.
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Today it is no secret that one of the greatest musicians the world has ever known was functionally deaf in his mid-40s.
It was a tragic irony that Beethoven wanted the world to understand, not only from a personal perspective, but also from a medical perspective.
The composer would outlive his doctor by nearly two decades, but nearly two centuries after Beethoven’s death, a team of researchers set out to fulfill his will in ways he never dreamed possible by genetically analyzing DNA from authenticated hair samples.
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 included progressive hearing loss beginning in his mid-to-late 20s and eventually leading to functional deafness by 1818,” explained biochemist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany in a press statement when the results were presented in 2023.
The root cause of this hearing loss was never known, not even to his personal physician, Dr. Johann Adam Schmidt.
What started as tinnitus in his 20s slowly gave way to a reduced tolerance for loud noise and eventually a loss of hearing in the higher tones, effectively ending his career as a performing artist.
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For a musician, nothing could be more ironic. In a letter to his brothers, Beethoven admitted that he was “hopelessly blown”, to the point of thinking about suicide.
It wasn’t just hearing loss that the composer had to deal with in his adult life. From the age of at least 22 he is said to have suffered severe abdominal pain and chronic bouts of diarrhoea.
Six years before his death the first signs of liver disease appeared, a disease believed to have been at least partially responsible for his death at the relatively young age of 56.
In 2007, a forensic investigation into a lock of hair believed to belong to Beethoven suggested that lead poisoning may have hastened his death, if not ultimately responsible for the symptoms that took his life.
Given the culture of drinking from lead vessels and the medical treatments of the time that involved the use of lead, this is hardly a surprising conclusion.
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This latest study, published in March 2023, debunks the theory, however, revealing that the hair never came from Beethoven, but rather an unknown woman.
More importantly, several locks confirmed to be far more likely from the composer’s head indicate that his death was likely caused by a hepatitis B infection, exacerbated by alcohol consumption and numerous risk factors for liver disease.
“We can’t say for sure what killed Beethoven, but now we can at least confirm the presence of a significant hereditary risk and an infection with the hepatitis B virus,” explained Krause.
“We can also rule out several other less plausible genetic causes.”
As for his other conditions?
“We couldn’t find a definitive cause for Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems,” Krause said.
An authentic lock of Beethoven’s hair affixed to a letter dated 1827 and photographed in 2018 by American Beethoven Society member Kevin Brown. (Begg et al., Curr. Biol.2023)
In a way, we are left with more questions about the life and death of the famous classical composer.
Where did he contract hepatitis? How did a lock of woman’s hair like Beethoven’s pass the centuries? And what was behind his intestinal pains and hearing loss?
Given that the team was inspired by Beethoven’s desire for the world to understand his hearing loss, it’s an unfortunate result. Although there was one more surprise buried in his lashes.
Further investigation comparing the Y chromosome from the hair samples to those of modern relatives descending from Beethoven’s paternal line indicates a mismatch.
This suggests extramarital sexual activity in the generations preceding the composer’s birth.
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“This finding suggests an extrapair paternity event in his paternal line between the conception of Hendrik van Beethoven in Kampenhout, Belgium, in c.1572, and the conception of Ludwig van Beethoven seven generations later, in 1770, in Bonn, Germany,” said Tristan Begg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
It might all be more than a younger Beethoven bargained for, given the fateful request he put to paper.
He would never have dreamed of the secrets that were being kept as his friends and associates cut the hair from his body on that gloomy and stormy Monday night in 1827.
This research was published in Current Biology.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2023.