Nearly 200 years after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, researchers used DNA from authenticated locks of his hair to examine the health problems that troubled him for years, and they found fresh clues about his liver disease, but no clear answer for his deafness.
Beethoven died on a Monday in March 1827 after a long illness. He had been bedridden since the previous Christmas, with jaundice, swollen limbs and abdomen, and severe breathing trouble. After his death, his associates found a document he had written 25 years earlier asking his brothers to make details of his condition public.
By his mid-40s, Beethoven was functionally deaf. In a press statement in 2023, biochemist Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany said: “Our primary goal was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, which famously include progressive hearing loss, beginning in his mid- to late-20s and eventually leading to him being functionally deaf by 1818.”
The cause of that hearing loss has never been known, including to his physician Dr Johann Adam Schmidt. It began as tinnitus in his 20s, then progressed to reduced tolerance for loud noise and hearing loss in higher pitches, ending his career as a performing artist.
In a letter to his brothers, Beethoven said he was “hopelessly afflicted”, and had contemplated suicide.
He also had other health problems. From at least age 22, he is said to have suffered severe abdominal pain and chronic diarrhea. Six years before his death, the first signs of liver disease appeared. That illness is thought to have been at least partly responsible for his death at age 56.
A 2007 forensic investigation into a lock of hair believed to be Beethoven’s suggested lead poisoning may have hastened his death or caused the symptoms that killed him. But the study published in March 2023 found that hair did not belong to Beethoven at all. It came from an unknown woman.
The newer study, published in Current Biology, found that several other locks were far more likely to be Beethoven’s. Those samples suggested his death was probably caused by a hepatitis B infection, made worse by his drinking and multiple risk factors for liver disease.
“We cannot say definitely what killed Beethoven, but we can now at least confirm the presence of significant heritable risk, and an infection with hepatitis B virus,” Krause said. “We can also eliminate several other less plausible genetic causes.”
The team still could not explain some of his most famous ailments. “We were unable to find a definitive cause for Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems,” Krause said.
The DNA research also turned up another finding. When researchers compared the Y chromosome from the hair samples with those of modern relatives descended from Beethoven’s paternal line, they found a mismatch.
“This finding suggests an extrapair paternity event in his paternal line between the conception of Hendrik van Beethoven in Kampenhout, Belgium in c.1572 and the conception of Ludwig van Beethoven seven generations later in 1770, in Bonn, Germany,” said Tristan Begg, a biological anthropologist now at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
The research was published in Current Biology.
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