Beethoven Ludwig van - Beethovens Hair

CONTENTS

KH

Alive again? then show me where he is:
Ill give a thousand pound to look upon him.
He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.
Comb down his hair: look! look! it stands upright,
Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
HENRY THE SIXTH, PART 2

Oh, it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, IN A LETTER TO FRANZ WEGELER

PRELUDE

B EETHOVENS HAIR, SHELTERED FOR NEARLY two centuries inside a glass locket, was about to become the subject of rapt attention on a warm December morning in 1995. The two men principally involved in its purchaseBrooklyn-born Ira Brilliant, a retired Phoenix real estate developer, and a Mexican-American physician whose surprising name is Che Guevarahad been joined by a coterie of inquisitors in a teaching theater at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson: a forensic anthropologist was present; so were a medical examiner, an archivist and conservator, a medical photographer, a recording secretary, a notary public, a local television news team, plus a London-based film crew from the BBC. Everyone gathered promptly at 10:30 because there was much to do, and the first order of business was the signing of a contract that stipulated how the hair would be divided. Once counted, strand by aging and fragile strand, 27 percent would remain the property of Dr. Alfredo Che Guevara, the principal investor, a urological surgeon from the border town of Nogales. The remainder would be donated by him and Brilliant to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California, where it would remain in perpetuity.

Contract signed and the notarys seal correctly affixed, soon it was time to turn to the locket that held the hair. Housed in a dark-wood oval frame a bit more than ten centimeters long, the coil of fine brown and gray hair was sealed between two pieces of glass, one of which was convex. On the brittle paper that was sealed to the flat back of the frame, someone named Paul Hiller long ago had written the following words in German, then added his signature beneath them:

This hair was cut off Beethovens corpse by my father, Dr. Ferdinand v. Hiller on the day after Ludwig van Beethovens death, that is, on 27 March 1827, and was given to me as a birthday present in Cologne on May 1, 1883.

While Ira Brilliant and the others watched with fascination, Dr. Guevara and conservator Nancy Odegaardboth dressed in green surgical scrubs and wearing masks and glovesworked at a sterile table, measuring with calipers the glass and the frame that surrounded it, calling out a series of numbers as well as their impressions of the lockets condition before Guevara wielded a scalpel and prepared to go inside. This was surgery of a sort, and the doctor proceeded with careful confidence, describing each cut and every observation with the kind of commentary he might have made if the subject at hand had been a human gut and the gathered observers were surgical interns still prone to getting queasy. Now Im slicing through the last of the glue that holds the paper backing, he announced, his voice bearing more than a hint of his preoccupation. Ill pull the backing away now, and... lets see, below... heres another layer of paper, with writing on it, and... the writings in French, I believe. Can someone verify that this is in French and translate it for us?

A video camera designed for recording the intricacies and complexities of rather more conventional surgeries looked down from overhead and the rest of the group watched the doctors work on television monitors placed around the room, and yes, that was French, someone offered. The text was set in type, but was difficult to make sense of, and the rooms quick consensus was that the paper was simply newspaper scrap that had been used for backing. Yet the words written on the next layer Guevara exposed were both decipherable and surprising. Handwritten this time, and again in German, they explained that the locket was newly pasted by a picture framer in Cologne in 1911, the resealing done at a time when Paul Hiller would have been fifty-eight years old, and presumably about the time when he wrote his explanatory note on the outer paper.

At last the surgeon held nothing more than the conjoined pieces of glass in his gloved hands, and Odegaard helped steady the glass on edge as Guevara began to break the seal with a scalpel. Wow, could you hear that? he asked. I heard a rush of air like a vacuum when I started to separate the glass. Two minutes passed as the surgeons knife slowly circumnavigated the oval, then finally the pieces were free and Guevara delicately lifted the domed glass away from its mate, and although no one spoke for a moment, you could sense the massed excitement. Exposed for the first time in at least eight decades, perhaps many more, there was Beethovens hairdarker than it appeared under glass, a carefully shaped coil containing a hundred or two hundred strands, one of the group guessed. When he had been helped with the straps that held his mask over his nose, Guevara bent to the table to smell the hair. It was odorless, he declared, then Ira Brilliant and the others pressed forward to get close to the remarkable relic themselves.

Before the morning ended and the team adjourned for something of a celebratory lunch, Beethovens hair was photographed, weighed, and examined under a high-power microscope. Forensic anthropologist Walter Birkby declared that on quick inspection the condition of the hair appeared consistent with hair that was approximately two hundred years old; he noted that it appeared to be free of liceor the carcasses of liceand the group was delighted when he noted as well that follicles were attached to at least some of the strands. Fifteen-year-old Ferdinand Hiller must have pulled at the hair as he snipped itthat was the initial suppositionand the fact that the boy inadvertently pulled a few follicles from Beethovens scalp meant DNA testing might indeed be feasible, a possibility that none of the group had dared count on till that moment.

The cameras continued to roll at a press conference in the early afternoon, and the team outlined publicly for the first time the array of tests it planned to undertake. Prior to examining the hairs DNAif that were donelikely there would be examinations to determine whether opiates had been in Beethovens system at the time of his death. Other analyses would search for trace metals in his hair: high levels of zinc might mean that his immune system had been severely compromised; the presence of mercury could indicate that he had been treated for an infection, and elevated levels of mercury might even go some distance toward explaining Beethovens notoriously eccentric behavior; an abundance of lead would point to one potential cause of the composers deafness, and even might explain the concert of other maladies that had plagued him throughout his adult life.

Drawing on techniques and testing procedures that were established when a lock of Napoleons hair was studied in the 1970stests that concluded that the emperor had not been poisoned, contrary to what many historians long had suspectedthe Beethoven tests would be designed to destroy or permanently alter only a very minimal amount of the hair he had just unlocked, Guevara informed the assembled reporters. And the tests would be carried out only by highly qualified scientists: Were going to prepare a protocol to do the work under strict conditions that are forensic, sterile, and modern. We plan to tabulate people who have FBI-quality expertise, then invite them to propose specific tests to us. But we wont sacrifice the bulk of the hair. The main thing is our hope that two hundred years from now people wont think that there were neophytes at work who couldnt get their act together. Twenty-five or fifty years ago, this kind of testing wouldnt have been possible. And fifty years from now, maybe well get much more information.