Ludwig van Beethoven died in Vienna about 200 years ago after composing some of the most influential works in classical music. Since then, biographers have sought to explain the reasons for the German composer’s death at the age of 56, his hearing loss and his struggles with chronic illnesses.
An international team of researchers, who studied Beethoven’s genome using strands of his hair, may now have some answers. According to the researchers, the probable cause of Beethoven’s death is liver failure or cirrhosis, caused by a number of reasons, including high alcohol consumption.
“We looked at possible genetic causes for his three main symptoms – the progressive hearing loss, problems with the digestive system and a liver disease that eventually led to his death due to liver failure,” said Marcus Noten, one of the authors of the study written at the Institute of Human Genetics at the University Hospital of Bonn, Germany. “Beethoven,” Nutan said, had a “strong genetic predisposition to liver disease,” and traces of the hepatitis B virus were detected in his hair. “We believe the disease was created by a combination of genetic predisposition, well-documented chronic alcohol consumption and hepatitis B disease,” Nutan said.
Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said that hepatitis B disease “was probably quite common at the time” in the early 19th century. “At least in the last months before his death he was sick with an infection of the hepatitis B virus,” Krause said.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Cell Press Current Biology last Wednesday, were unable to determine any genetic factors for the progressive hearing loss that eventually left Beethoven completely deaf. The researchers analyzed eight strands of hair said to have come from Beethoven’s head and determined that five of them were “almost certainly authentic,” according to Tristan Begg, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. “Because we reconstructed the genome from extremely short DNA segments, we only mapped about two-thirds of it satisfactorily,” he said. One of the most famous locks of hair, known as “Healer’s Lock”, was the subject of previous research that found it contained high levels of lead, was found to be inauthentic and did not appear to have belonged to a woman at all.
A family secret
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in 1827, struggled with digestive system problems at various times of his life as well as jaundice. “There were periods when he suffered from an acute illness and was unable to work, for example, his month-long period of acute illness in the spring of 1825,” Begg said. The researchers studied Beethoven’s DNA data and archival documents and also uncovered discrepancies between his legal genealogy and his biological genealogy.
Examining Beethoven’s biological family tree, as reflected in his DNA, they found an “extra-marital paternity event”—a child born as a result of an extramarital relationship—in Beethoven’s direct paternal line, said Thomas Kivisield of the Genomics Institute at the University of Tartu. Kiwischild said this occurred within the seven generations that separate his ancestor, Aart van Beethoven, who lived in the late 16th century and Beethoven’s birth in 1770. Beg said it was not surprising that it was not documented. “You wouldn’t expect another paternity event to be recorded,” he said. “It cannot be ruled out that Beethoven himself was born as a result of betrayal,” Beg said. “I do not support this theory,” he stressed, “I am simply saying that it is a possibility and it should be considered.”
In a letter from 1802, Beethoven asks his brother that his health problems, especially his hearing loss, be investigated after his death. “He wanted to have his body examined at the post-mortem examination,” Krause said. “Basically, we are fulfilling his wish, to a certain extent, with this project.”