Australian gets Beethoven’s hair tested – and may have solved mystery of his deafness

This particular story began a few years ago, when researchers realised that DNA analysis had advanced enough to justify an examination of hair said to have been clipped from Beethoven’s head by anguished fans as he lay dying.

William Meredith, the founding director of the Ira F. Brilliant Centre for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University began searching for locks at auctions and in museums. Eventually he and his colleagues ended up with five locks that were confirmed by a DNA analysis to have come from the composer’s head.

Kevin Brown, an Australian businessman with a passion for Beethoven, owned three of the locks and wanted to honour Beethoven’s request in 1802 that when he died doctors might attempt to figure out why he had been so ill. Brown sent two locks to a specialised lab at the Mayo Clinic that has the equipment and expertise to test for heavy metals.

The result, said Paul Jannetto, the lab director, was stunning. One of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micrograms of lead per gram of hair, and the other had 380 micrograms.

A normal level in hair is less than 4 micrograms of lead per gram.

“It definitely shows Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” Jannetto said.

“These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We get samples from around the world, and these values are an order of magnitude higher.”

Beethoven’s hair also had arsenic levels 13 times what is normal and mercury levels that were four times the normal amount. But the high amounts of lead, in particular, could have caused many of his ailments, Jannetto said.

The investigators, including Jannetto, Brown and Meredith, describe their findings in a letter published in the journal Clinical Chemistry this week.

The analysis updates a report from last year, when the same team said Beethoven did not have lead poisoning. Now with thorough testing they say that he had enough lead in his system to, at the very least, explain his deafness and illnesses.

David Eaton, a toxicologist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, said that Beethoven’s gastrointestinal problems “are completely consistent with lead poisoning”. As for Beethoven’s deafness, he added, high doses of lead affect the nervous system and could have destroyed his hearing.

“Whether the chronic dose was sufficient to kill him is hard to say,” Eaton added.

No one is suggesting the composer was deliberately poisoned. But, Jerome Nriagu, an expert on lead poisoning in history and a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, said that lead had been used in wines and food in 19th-century Europe, as well as in medicines and ointments.

One likely source of Beethoven’s high levels of lead was cheap wine. Lead, in the form of lead acetate, also called “lead sugar”, has a sweet taste. In Beethoven’s time it was often added to poor quality wine to make it taste better.

Wine was also fermented in kettles soldered with lead, which would leach out as the wine aged, Nriagu said. And, he added, corks on wine bottles were presoaked in lead salt to improve the seal.

Beethoven drank copious amounts of wine, about a bottle a day, and later in his life even more, believing it was good for his health and also, Meredith said, because he had become addicted to it. In the last few days before his death at age 56 in 1827, his friends gave him wine by the spoonful.

When he was 32, Beethoven mourned that he could not hear a flute or a shepherd singing, which, he wrote, “brought me almost to despair. A little more and I would have committed suicide — only Art held me back. Ah it seemed unthinkable to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I feel lies within me.”

Over the years, Beethoven consulted many doctors, trying treatment after treatment for his ailments and his deafness, but found no relief. At one point, he was using ointments and taking 75 medicines, many of which most likely contained lead.

In 1823, he wrote to an acquaintance, also deaf, about his own inability to hear, calling it a “grievous misfortune,” and noting: “doctors know little; one finally tires of them.”

His Ninth Symphony was most likely a way to reconcile his grief with his art.

Since he was a teenager, Beethoven had been enthralled by a poem, Ode To Joy, by Friedrich Schiller.

He set the poem to music in the Ninth, sung by soloists and a chorus – considered the first instance of singing in a symphony. It was the culmination of the symphony, depicting a search for joy.

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The first movement is a depiction of despair, Beethoven wrote. The second movement, with its loud kettledrums, is an attempt to break through the despair. The third reveals a “tender” world where despair is set aside, Beethoven wrote. But setting aside despair was not enough, he concluded. Instead, “one must search for something that calls us to life.”

The finale, the fourth movement, was that calling. It was the Ode to Joy.