Prelude

Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved
by Russell Martin

Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beethoven's death. By the time he was buried, Beethoven's head had been nearly shorn by the many people who similarly had wanted a lasting memento of the great man. Such was his powerful effect on all those who had heard his music.

For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, and perhaps was destined to end up sequestered in a bank vault, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, during the darkest days of the Second World War. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. Who gave him the hair, and why? And what was the fate of those refugees, holed up in the attic of Gilleleje's church?

After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are startling, and are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.

In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, an Indiana Jones-like tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

An astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels - from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.

Beethoven's 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 purchase-Brooklyn-born Ira Brilliant, a retired Phoenix real estate developer, and a Mexican-American physician whose surprising name is Che Guevara-had 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 notary's 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 Beethoven's corpse by my father, Dr. Ferdinand v. Hiller on the day after Ludwig van Beethoven's 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 Odegaard-both dressed in green surgical scrubs and wearing masks and gloves-worked 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 locket's 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 I'm slicing through the last of the glue that holds the paper backing," he announced, his voice bearing more than a hint of his preoccupation.

"I'll pull the backing away now, and ... let's see, below ... here's another layer of paper, with writing on it, and ... the writing's 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 doctor's 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 room's 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 surgeon's 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 Beethoven's hair-darker 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, Beethoven's 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 lice-or the carcasses of lice-and 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 it-that was the initial supposition-and the fact that the boy inadvertently pulled a few follicles from Beethoven's 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 hair's DNA-if that were done-likely there would be examinations to determine whether opiates had been in Beethoven's 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 Beethoven's notoriously eccentric behavior; an abundance of lead would point to one potential cause of the composer's 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 Napoleon's hair was studied in the 1970s-tests that concluded that the emperor had not been poisoned, contrary to what many historians long had suspected-the 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: "We're 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 won't sacrifice the bulk of the hair. The main thing is our hope that two hundred years from now people won't think that there were neophytes at work who couldn't get their act together.

Copyright © 2001 by Russell Martin.

About the Author

Russell Martin is a lifelong resident of Colorado. He graduated in 1974 from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he returns once each year to teach a course in creative nonfiction. He spent a postgraduate year on a Thomas Watson Foundation fellowship in Britain and Guatemala, then worked as a newspaper reporter in Telluride, Colorado for a number of years before becoming a freelance writer.