As a young composer in 1802, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a heartbreaking letter to his brothers that he intended to serve as a will.
In the Heiligenstadt testament, a distraught Beethoven poured out his heart to posterity, describing his growing deafness, his agonizing abdominal ailment, his loss of hope and thoughts of suicide.
He even requested an autopsy in order for doctors to finally figure out what ailed him, “so [that] as much as possible, the world may be reconciled to me after my death.”
It has taken 199 years, but the resolution of Beethoven’s finale may be at hand.
Scientists said Tuesday that a lock of hair snipped from Beethoven’s head after he died in 1827 at age 56 has revealed a concentration of lead 100 times greater than the levels commonly found in people today, indicating that the erratic genius suffered from lead poisoning.
“We tested 43 elements, but only one was unusual. That was lead. It stood out like a sore thumb,” said William Walsh, scientific director of the Naperville-based Health Research Institute, where the hair was studied.
For five years, Walsh, an expert in hair and chemical analysis, has been directing an unusual international scientific effort to unlock the secrets of the lock.
The project was possible because, when Beethoven was interred in his beloved Vienna, most of his hair wasn’t. Souvenir-hunting fans snipped off so much of the brown-and-silver mane that he went to his grave nearly bald.
The venture is the latest scientific attempt to solve some of the mysteries of history using high-tech techniques–those investigated so far include whether Napoleon was poisoned, did arsenic also fell President Zachary Taylor (no), and the parentage of various historical progeny. Such research also may resolve the widely publicized debate over whether Abraham Lincoln had Marfan syndrome.
But amid the common quest for truth shared by science and history, Beethoven’s hair opens up a whole new can of worms.
How could he have accumulated so much lead? What effect did it have on his personality, his life, his art? Could it have contributed to his deafness, even his death? If untreated, the effects of lead poisoning in an adult are lifelong, chronic and serious.
“Beethoven saw physician after physician in search of a cure for his physical ailments,” Walsh said. “He suffered from bad digestion, chronic abdominal pain, irritability and depression. Those are exactly the symptoms of lead poisoning.
“I have no doubt that he suffered from plumbism–lead poisoning–which could explain his lifelong illnesses. It would have had an impact on his personality and could have contributed to his death.”
Beethoven is believed to have died of pneumonia and complications of abdominal problems, which are common symptoms of lead poisoning.
“What caused his deafness is the million-dollar question,” said William Meredith, director of the Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California.
But his colleague, Walsh, cannot answer that.
“It’s very unlikely that lead could have caused it.” He said. “Beethoven’s deafness is attributable to an illness like Paget’s disease, an abnormal growth of bone, which destroyed his hearing. Such a growth was found in the autopsy he requested in the Heiligenstadt testament.”
Two Arizona music lovers bought a lock of 582 strands of Beethoven’s hair at auction in 1994 (they paid $7,300) and offered it for scientific analysis. The strands were between 3 and 6 inches long and colored gray and two shades of brown. Given that hair grows at an average rate of one-half inch per month, the lock represents hair grown during the last six to 12 months of his life.
Other locks of Beethoven’s hair can be found at the Library of Congress; the University of Hartford, Conn; the British Library in London; the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna; and the Beethoven-Haus, in Bonn.
So far, researchers have learned that the composer didn’t have lice and didn’t take morphine for the kidney and liver problems that plagued him. Walsh particularly had been looking for mercury, because mercury in those days was used to treat syphilis, which some scholars think Beethoven may have had.
“We found no traces of mercury,” Walsh said. “We’re in support of scholars who discount venereal disease.”
The study results announced Tuesday by Walsh and scientists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory corroborated an earlier analysis by Dr. Walter McCrone, of the McCrone Research Institute, 2820 S. Michigan Ave.
McCrone, a pioneering microscopist who was just elected chemist of the year by the American Chemical Society, first made world headlines in 1979. He showed that pigment particles (red ochre and vermilion) from the Shroud of Turin, a 3-by-14-foot cloth depicting Christ’s crucified body and believed by some to be his death shroud, actually dated to 1355.
More recently, McCrone detected only very low levels of arsenic in Napoleon’s hair, which helped to establish that he probably wasn’t poisoned, as some historians believed.
As far as how Beethoven could have ingested so much lead, guesswork has centered on a theory proposed by Beethoven expert William Meredith. According to Meredith, the water supply in Vienna during Beethoven’s time contained lead, and many people drank from lead cups.
Walsh disagreed with his colleague, however.
“We hear of no other cases of lead poisoning affecting Viennese of that period, and they all drank the water. We know he got the symptoms when he was in his early 20s. We know that he wasn’t exposed earlier because children lose some of their mental capabilities when they are exposed to lead.”
Beethoven’s personality transformed during his illness. He had been a friendly, pleasant musical prodigy, but then became irritable, hot tempered and socially isolated. He suffered from bouts of depression.
“One possibility is that, when he was a teenager, his mother died and he became quite depressed and sought treatment at spas, where he spent a lot of time drinking the waters and bathing. There were dozens of possible sources of lead around, but I think he must have ingested a great amount of it during a relatively short period.”
This lock of Beethoven’s hair has its own history. It was clipped by Ferdinand Hiller, a musical colleague of no little fame, and passed from generation to generation of Hillers to wind up in the hands of a Danish physician, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to save Jews in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
It is believed Fremming was given the hair in gratitude for his work on behalf of the Jews. After Fremming’s death, his daughter assigned it for auction, whereupon it was purchased by the two Americans.
In the course of the project, Walsh looked for distinctive trace-metal patterns associated with genius, irritability, glucose disorders and malabsorption and found they were not present.
Another analysis showed that Beethoven avoided opiate painkillers during his long and painful death, keeping his mind clear for his music, which he continued working on until the day he died.
“Now it’s up to the Beethoven scholars and medical experts to determine where he got the lead and what it meant,” Walsh said. “I feel that, by our analysis, we finally have done what he asked us to do.”
