Ludwig van Beethoven died a little under 200 years ago, in 1827, but the health problems leading to his death at the age of 56 have been the subject of speculation for almost as long.
Born in Bonn in 1770, the great composer is unique given the enormous amount of literature that has been written about his health problems. Recently, geneticists from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn used molecular genetic methods to rule out some theories and state as definitively as one could two centuries later about the cause of death of der Spagnol, the Spaniard, his nickname because of his dark complexion. (It is highly likely he had Moorish blood from an ancestor who served in the Spanish army when they occupied the Netherlands.)
When the maestro was on his deathbed, hundreds of friends and well-wishers came to say good-by and many asked for a lock of his hair as a remembrance. One such lock was clipped shortly after his death by Ferdinand Hiller, a 15-year-old composer and acolyte who had visited Beethoven four times before he died. Hiller passed the lock down to his son decades later and an analysis of the hair at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois found lead levels to be up to 100 times normal. Based on this, many scholars speculated that he contracted lead poisoning from medicine, wine, or eating and drinking utensils.
Only it wasn’t actually his hair, a recent DNA analysis revealed, but the hair of an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, possibly that of the wife of Hiller’s son.
The DNA analysis came about when it occurred to Tristan Begg, a student studying archaeology at the Universität Tübingen, that DNA analysis had advanced sufficiently to be used to analyze locks of Beethoven’s hair.
Another Beethoven scholar, William Meredith, began searching for other locks and the race was on. The Hiller lock was eliminated because it was from a woman. Out of the seven other locks gathered together, one was eliminated because it could not be tested, one was deemed inauthentic, and five were found to have the same DNA. What’s more, two of the five had impeccable chains of custody, giving the researchers a high degree of confidence that these locks were snipped from Beethoven’s head.
The DNA analysis showed DNA variants that made the great composer genetically predisposed to liver disease. In addition, his hair contained traces of hepatitis B DNA, which led to another mystery, namely how could he have contracted the virus, which is normally shared through sex and shared needles.
Little is known of the composer’s sex life but it’s quite likely that he acquired the virus during childbirth, something that is not uncommon. The DNA analysis also showed that he was not related to others in his family line, a finding that has been a great disappointment to the van Beethoven family of Belgium, who, at least according to archival records, shared a 16th-century ancestor with the maestro.
One author of the study, Maarten Larmuseau, a professor of genetic genealogy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, believes that the composer’s father was fathered by someone who was not his grandmother’s husband.
While the DNA analysis offers strong clues, it does not provide definitive answers about the composer’s death nor does it tackle his chronic and very painful gastrointestinal issues that plagued him throughout his adult life.
The DNA analysis does also not attempt to explain Beethoven’s hearing loss, which began when the composer was in his mid-20s and which led to complete deafness later in life.
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