Strands of Beethoven’s hair reveal family secrets and health problems

() — Before the composer Ludwig van Beethoven died on March 27, 1827, his wish was that his ailments be studied and shared so that “as far as possible, at least the world will be reconciled to me after my death.”

Now, researchers have taken steps to partially fulfill that request by analyzing Beethoven’s DNA from preserved locks of hair and sequencing the composer’s genome for the first time.

A study detailing the findings was published Wednesday in the academic journal Current Biology.

“Our main objective was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, including progressive hearing loss, which began in his mid to late 20s and led to functional deafness in 1818,” he says in Johannes Krause, study co-author and professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a statement.

The five hair samples helped scientists uncover facts about her family history, her chronic health problems and what may have contributed to her death at age 56.

Beethoven’s sufferings

In addition to hearing loss, the famed classical music composer suffered from recurring gastrointestinal complaints throughout his life, as well as severe liver disease.

Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers in 1802 asking that their physician, Johann Adam Schmidt, determine and share the nature of his “illness” after his death. The letter is known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

But Beethoven died 18 years after his favorite doctor, and after the composer’s death, the will was discovered in a hidden compartment in his desk. In the letter, Beethoven admitted how hopeless he felt as a music composer struggling with hearing loss, but his work prevented him from taking his own life. The musician said that he did not want to leave ”before having produced all the works that he felt the impulse to compose”.

Since his death, questions have been raised about the origin of the disease and the true cause of Beethoven’s death. In the last seven years of his life, the composer suffered at least two attacks of jaundice, associated with liver disease, which led to the general belief that he died of cirrhosis.

Since then, medical biographers have examined Beethoven’s letters and journals, as well as his autopsy, his doctors’ notes, and even notes taken on the two occasions when his body was exhumed, in 1863 and 1888, in the hope of reconstructing it. his complicated medical history.

But the researchers behind the new study went a step further about eight years ago, when they set out to do a genetic analysis of Beethoven’s hair. The samples they used included hair cut from his head in the seven years before his death.

genetic revelations

The team analyzed a total of eight hair samples from public and private collections in the UK, Europe and the US. During their authentication work, they discovered that two did not come from Beethoven at all, while another was too damaged to analyze.

Previous work suggesting that Beethoven had been lead poisoned was based on a hair sample that was not his, but that of a woman.

But five of the samples came from the same European male and matched his German ancestry. In April 1826, Beethoven hand-delivered one of the locks to the pianist Anton Halm, saying: “Das sind meine Haare!” (“That’s my hair!”).

Genetic analysis uncovered hidden clues in the composer’s DNA that could add context to his health problems.

“We couldn’t find a definitive cause for Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems,” Krause said.

“However, we found a number of significant genetic risk factors for liver disease,” he added. “We also found evidence of a hepatitis B virus infection at the latest in the months before the composer’s final illness. That likely contributed to his death.”

Beethoven’s genetic data also helped researchers rule out other possible causes of his ailments, such as celiac disease, an autoimmune disease, lactose intolerance or irritable bowel syndrome.

Letters written by Beethoven, as well as those from his friends, show that the composer consumed alcohol regularly. Although it is difficult to know how much he drank, a close friend wrote that Beethoven drank at least a liter of wine with lunch each day.

Alcohol use, combined with genetic risk factors for liver disease and his hepatitis B infection, could have created the perfect storm for Beethoven’s health near the end of his life.

“If your alcohol consumption was high enough over a long enough period of time, the interaction with your genetic risk factors presents a possible explanation for your cirrhosis,” says the study’s lead author, Tristan Begg, a PhD student at University of Cambridge.

However, the researchers cautioned that the timing of all these events was critical to understanding what contributed to Beethoven’s death. According to the authors, future research could reveal more data, including the reason for his hearing loss.

“We hope that by making Beethoven’s genome available to researchers, and perhaps adding more authenticated strands to the initial time series, remaining questions about his health and genealogy can one day be answered,” Begg said.

A secret in the DNA

Once the research team established Beethoven’s genetic profile, they compared it to the DNA of his living relatives in Belgium. But in a twist, they weren’t able to determine a complete match.

Although some of the relatives shared a paternal ancestor through Beethoven’s family in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, there was no Y-chromosome match in Beethoven’s hair samples.

This suggests that, at some point in the family’s history, there was an extramarital affair on the part of Beethoven’s father from which a son was born.

“By combining DNA data and archival documents, we were able to observe a discrepancy between the legal and biological genealogy of Ludwig van Beethoven,” says Maarten Larmuseau, study co-author and genetic genealogist at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Researchers believe the romance occurred sometime between the 1572 conception of Hendrik van Beethoven, a patrilineal ancestor of Beethoven seven generations removed from the composer, and Beethoven’s conception in 1770.