The Boy Who Snipped the Lock, Part 2

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

(Page 5 of 5)

The autopsy had been performed by Dr. Johannes Wagner, a pathologist and associate of Beethoven's final physician, Dr. Andreas Wawruch, who had assisted him. During the methodical morning procedure, the two men had discovered that Beethoven's liver, shrunk to half the size of a healthy one, was leathery and covered with nodules; the spleen was black and tough and twice its normal size; the pancreas too was unusually large and hard; and each of the pale kidneys contained numerous calcified stones. The deaf man's auditory nerves were shriveled and marrowless, but the nearby facial nerves were impressively large; the auditory arteries were "dilated to more than the size of a crow's quill" and had become surprisingly brittle; the bone of the skull was strangely dense, and the remarkably white and fluid-filled convolutions of the brain were much deeper, wider, and more numerous than the physicians would have expected them to be. The two doctors had not been surprised, of course, when they encountered much that was abnormal, but knowledge of both pathology and disease etiology remained limited enough in that era that neither man could infer from the findings what might have caused the composer's deafness or indeed any of his many other maladies.

Because of the trauma induced by the autopsy itself, as well as the disfigurement of his face caused by the missing bones, Beethoven appeared only suggestive of the man with whom Hummel and Ferdinand Hiller had conversed a few days earlier, and the two men did not remain for long beside his coffin. But before they departed, young Hiller asked his mentor whether he might be permitted to cut a lock of the master composer's hair. It was a request that Hiller would choose not to mention in his 1871 recollection - perhaps reluctant to detail or acknowledge it, even half a century later, because throughout his life the otherwise open and gregarious Hiller virtually never had spoken about his private life or what he secretly held dear, but perhaps also because explicit permission to take a keepsake had not been granted by Beethoven's brother Johann, by Stephan von Breuning, who had become executor of his estate, or even by the factotum Anton Schindler. Yet other locks of hair, it was obvious, had been cut already, and it is easy to imagine Hummel whispering his assent to his student, the two men quietly moved by the simple ritual and the sadness of the moment, Ferdinand Hiller wielding the scissors he had brought with him for that hopeful purpose, lifting a thick lock of Beethoven's long and half-gray hair, pulling it away from his head, and setting it free.

Ferdinand Hiller had been born in Frankfurt in 1811, the son of a wealthy merchant who, in order to help conceal his Jewish identity at a time when anti-Semitism was rising perilously in Europe, had changed his name late in the eighteenth century from Isaac Hildesheim to Justus Hiller. Yet Frankfurt itself was a comparatively tolerant city, one in which Jews, despite a few significant limitations, were able to live free from persecution. Ferdinand's father and his wife, Regine Sichel Hiller, were well-to-do, urbane, and cultivated; they were committed to doing everything they could to assimilate their son into Germany's cultural mainstream, but they were determined as well to ensure that he truly enjoyed his childhood, trying - rather unsuccessfully as it turned out - not to draw too much early attention to his remarkable musical talents. When he was seven, they acquiesced to entreaties from friends, and agreed that the boy could become a regular student of pianist Aloys Schmitt as well as take lessons in composition from Frankfurt composer J. G. Vollweiler. Three years later, ten-year-old Ferdinand performed in public for the first time, playing Mozart's Concerto in C Minor and dazzling two musicians who were present at the recital - his parents' friends Ludwig Spohr and Ignaz Moscheles, both of whom had been colleagues of Beethoven during years they spent in Vienna. The two men insisted that the boy really must be sent to Weimar to study with Kapellmeister Johann Hummel, himself not only a contemporary and friend of Beethoven, but also the sole composer in Europe whose talents equaled Beethoven's, at least according to men like Spohr and Moscheles.

Warm and generous and surpassingly homely, the much loved and respected Hummel accepted few students, yet as a prodigy himself forty years before in Vienna, he had lived for two years with Wolfgang Mozart and had been his student, an extraordinarily formative experience that he now felt compelled to try to return in kind. When he met the young Hiller and heard him play the piano, he was impressed by the boy's promise, and soon after Hiller became his pupil in 1825 the two also became quite close, Hummel and his wife, Elisabeth, taking paternal charge of the thirteen-year-old on his parents' behalf, and encouraging him to expand his talents in every direction. Accordingly, they introduced him to former student Felix Mendelssohn, himself an impressive prodigy only two years Hiller's senior, as well as the celebrated poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the days before they had set out from Weimar for Vienna in the spring of 1827, Goethe had written a verse in young Hiller's souvenir album, and Beethoven had been heartened to hear Hiller's news of Goethe when he and Hummel visited him in the days before he died.

Hiller heard the venerated poet's name intoned once more at the gates of the Wahring cemetery on the afternoon of Beethoven's funeral, when actor Heinrich AnschYtz declared that Beethoven and Goethe long had been the foremost figures in the arts of the German-speaking world. Still only a teenager, Ferdinand Hiller had met and conversed with both of these towering men, and as he watched Hummel, his portly friend and wonderful teacher, throw three laurel wreaths onto the closed coffin that now lay deep in the earth, it seemed to the young man - the lock of hair he had claimed safely tucked away in his album - that a life lived richly in the arts surely was all that he should strive for.

Ferdinand Hiller had returned to Weimar again in July when he read in the Abendzeitung, published in Dresden, an obituary written by poet and historian Johann Sporschil that described an aspect of Beethoven that the boy had not been fortunate enough to glimpse:

No longer will the citizens of friendly Vienna ... see him hurrying through the street with his short yet firm steps barely touching the ground, until, fast as lightning, he vanishes around the corner. No longer will they be able to whisper with benevolent and indulgent pride to one another: "Did you see? Beethoven!"

Yes, Hiller had seen him, and he even had captured a lock of the great composer's hair. The memento had been part of Beethoven; it was neither his flesh nor his blood but it was him nonetheless. For many years, his wild hair had been the physical thing that most immediately characterized him - it was a metaphor somehow for his eccentric ebullience, his utter unpredictability, his astonishing artistic power - and Hiller knew he always would cherish the lock of hair and protect it vigilantly.

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.