Prelude, Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 5)

Twenty-five or fifty years ago, this kind of testing wouldn't have been possible. And fifty years from now, maybe we'll get much more information." But the newspaper and television reporters wanted to know more: they needed some sense of what motivated Guevara and his partner to buy the hair and now begin the process of having it rigorously examined. What was it about Beethoven that so obsessed them? "My interest in Beethoven is like a fire burning inside me," answered seventy-three-year-old Ira Brilliant, his Brooklyn accent diluted only a bit by thirty years of expatriation in Arizona. "I started collecting his letters and first editions twenty years ago out of a deep wish to own something Beethoven himself had touched. It was my way of paying homage to his greatness." A short man whose dense eyebrows and deep-set eyes seemed to mirror the composer's, Ira Brilliant explained that on a November day almost a year earlier, he phoned Guevara, his friend and fellow Beethoven zealot, soon after he had seen the lock of hair listed in a Sotheby's catalog, and the two had agreed that they would try to make it theirs. "This was much more than simply something Beethoven had touched. The hair is Beethoven. It's a marvelous relic." And the doctor agreed, of course. A large man with a thick shock of black hair atop his head, his speech inflected with echoes of his native Spanish-and "Che" to his friends since his long-ago college days-Guevara's obsession with both Beethoven's music and Beethoven the man tumbled out of him with a kind of evangelical passion.

"Beethoven was deaf, as you know. He suffered from kidney stones, which is a very painful condition. He had hepatitis; he had multiple episodes of gastrointestinal infections. For someone to have that many maladies and to suffer so greatly and yet produce superhuman music, music that can actually elevate the spirit to a much different plane than the ordinary plane we live in, is quite phenomenal." Beethoven's hair-still in the same coil in which it was wrapped nearly two centuries ago, the hundreds of separate strands still waiting to be counted-had been removed for safekeeping, but Che Guevara spoke of it as though it remained in the room: "To get this close to a man who was able to do this ... for me it's a personal triumph. Acquiring the hair already has changed my life." On a warm May afternoon a hundred and seventy years before, Beethoven's hair would have spread wildly out from his head and the dark eyes beneath it would have appeared small but piercingly bright as he made his daily walk through the city. His complexion was swarthy, his forehead broad and high, and much of his face had been pockmarked by smallpox back when he was a boy. He was short, even by the standards of his day, and because of intestinal troubles that by 1824 had plagued him for three decades, no longer was he the stout and stocky man he once had been.

He would have walked with a lumbering gait that spring, one that evidenced a curious kind of clumsiness, and he would not have heard the din of the grand and boisterous city in which he trod-not the constant racket of vendors' carts and carriages, nor the cacophonous noise of the jugglers, puppeteers, and street musicians who seemed to clog every corner; neither the kindly proffered greetings of acquaintances nor the taunts of the urchins who tagged at his heels. The deafness that twenty years before had begun to rob him of the subtlest kinds of sounds inexorably had reduced his world to animated and very isolated silence, and by now he could hear only what his mind imagined. Yet Ludwig van Beethoven, this strange and eccentric figure-who once had been arrested as a vagrant-was at that moment, in fact, the most celebrated composer in a city filled to its exquisite rooftops with composers. His Ninth Symphony had been premiered only days before to the most glorious kind of acclaim. He had become a true legend in Vienna in the three decades since he had made the city his home, and his bold, passionate, and altogether revolutionary compositions already seemed destined to endure. The people who would have greeted or simply recognized him as walked that afternoon would have understood that Herr Beethoven was aging quickly and clearly was not well. But at least his music, they would have warranted, would survive for centuries.

1770-1792 Ludwig van Beethoven had been his grandfather's name as well, and although he was not quite three when his grandfather died in 1773, the composer always imagined that his huge talents had come to him from his much revered namesake-himself the son of a baker in the Flemish city of Mechelen-who had become Kapellmeister, music director, of the Bonn court of Maximilian Friedrich in 1761. Beethoven's father, Johann, was for many years a tenor in the court choir; he taught singing and was a passably accomplished pianist and violinist as well, but at the time his father died in 1773, Johann's career was languishing and seemed unlikely to catch fire in the foreseeable future. His wife, born Maria Magdalena Keverich, the daughter of a cook at Maximilian Friedrich's summer palace at Ehrenbreitstein, already had been widowed when she married Johann in the autumn of 1767, a few days before her twenty-first birthday. A son by her first husband had died in infancy; so had her second child, Ludwig Maria, who died six days after his birth in 1769, the year before the third child, also named Ludwig, was born. Maria van Beethoven was intelligent, patient, kind, and, it appears, utterly unassuming, the young family's critical counterpoint to Johann, who grew increasingly bombastic, erratic, and undependable following his father's death and the denial of his application to succeed him as Kapellmeister, his behavior later exacerbated by a severe dependence on drink.

If Maria was her young son's ready support, Johann, according to the few accounts that exist, often was a terror to the boy, bullying him, beating him on occasion as well as, legends contend, dragging the weeping five-year-old from his bed to the piano late at night and drunkenly compelling him to practice. Yet his father's rages and overbearing demeanor somehow never soured the boy on music, and his remarkable talents quickly emerged despite them. Young Ludwig was only seven when he gave his first public performance on the piano; at eight, he began to receive piano, violin, and viola instruction from a series of noted court musicians, and by age eleven he had become deputy to court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, who had taken the boy under his tutelage a year before. Beethoven, whose academic education already had ended, occasionally played the organ at masses and court functions when Neefe had to be absent, and the tutor was far from reluctant to heap praise on his young protege. At Neefe's urging, the editors of the German Magazin der Musik posted a notice in March 1783 heralding Beethoven as a boy of "most promising talent. He plays the clavier very skillfully and with power [and] reads at sight very well ... This young genius deserves a subsidy in order to enable him to travel.

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.