Hair attached to Beethoven’s will reveals the mysterious reasons for the composer’s deafness

Nearly 200 years after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, researchers have extracted DNA from the composer’s locks, searching for clues about the health problems and hearing loss that plagued him.

After the composer’s death, colleagues sorted through his personal belongings and discovered a document written by Beethoven – a will in which he begged his brothers to make details of his estate public.

Now it’s no secret that one of the greatest musicians became functionally hard of hearing by the age of 40. It was a tragic irony that Beethoven wanted the world to understand not only from a personal point of view, but also from a medical one.

Nearly two centuries after Beethoven’s death, a team of researchers decided to carry out his will in a way he never dreamed of, by genetically analyzing the DNA in authenticated samples of his hair.

“Our main goal was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, which are known to include progressive hearing loss that began in his mid to late 20s and eventually led to functional deafness by 1818,” the biochemist explained. Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany in a press statement.

The underlying cause of this hearing loss was never known, not even to his personal physician, Dr. Johann Adam Schmidt. What began as tinnitus at the age of 20 gradually gave way to decreased tolerance to loud noise and eventually high-frequency hearing loss, effectively ending his performing career.

For a musician, there is nothing more ironic. In a letter addressed to his brothers, Beethoven admitted that he was “hopelessly ill,” and his thoughts went as far as committing suicide.

The composer had to deal with more than just hearing loss in his adult life. It is said that from at least the age of 22 he suffered from severe abdominal pain and chronic bouts of diarrhea. Six years before his death, the first signs of liver disease appeared, which was thought to be, at least in part, the cause of his death at the relatively young age of 56.

“In Beethoven’s situation in particular, it is a case where illnesses sometimes severely limited his creative activity,” explains study author Axel Schmidt, “and it has always been a mystery to doctors what was really behind this.”

In 2007, a forensic examination of a strand of hair believed to have belonged to Beethoven found that lead poisoning may have hastened his death, if not ultimately caused the symptoms that took his life. Given the culture of drinking from lead vessels and the medical procedures of the time that involved the use of lead, this finding is hardly surprising.

However, this new research debunks the theory, revealing that the hair did not originally belong to Beethoven, but to an unknown woman. More importantly, several strands that were confirmed to be more likely from the composer’s head demonstrate that his death was likely the result of hepatitis B infection, exacerbated by his alcohol consumption and numerous risk factors for liver disease. But besides this, researchers were unable to establish the causes of deafness and problems with the gastrointestinal tract.

“In some ways, we are left with more questions about the life and death of the famous classical composer. Where did he contract hepatitis? How was a lock of a woman’s hair passed off as Beethoven’s own for centuries? And what exactly was behind his abdominal pain and hearing loss?” admitted Johannes Krause.

Further research comparing the Y chromosome in hair samples with those in modern relatives descended from Beethoven’s paternal line points to a discrepancy. This suggests extramarital sexual activity in the generations preceding the composer’s birth.

“This discovery suggests the existence of extrapair paternal paternity between the conception of Hendrik van Beethoven in Kampenhout around 1572 and the conception of Ludwig van Beethoven seven generations later, in 1770, in Bonn,” says biologist and anthropologist Tristan Begg.