At 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven, then 53, took the stage of the magnificent Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna to help conduct the world premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the last he would ever complete.
This show, whose 200th anniversary is on Tuesday, was memorable in many ways. But it was marked by an incident at the beginning of the second movement that revealed to the audience of about 1,800 how deaf the revered composer had become.
Ted Albrecht, professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio and author of a recent Book in the Ninth Symphony, he described the scene.
The movement began with loud kettle drums and the crowd cheered wildly.
But Beethoven was ignorant of his applause and his music. He stood with his back to the audience, beating time. At that moment, a soloist grabbed his sleeve and turned him around to see the intense admiration he couldn’t hear.
It was yet another humiliation for a composer who had suffered from his deafness since he began to lose his hearing in his twenties.
But why had he gone deaf? And why did he suffer from incessant abdominal cramps, flatulence and diarrhea?
A cottage industry of fans and experts has debated various theories. Was it Paget’s disease of the bones, which in the skull can affect hearing? Did his irritable bowel syndrome cause gastrointestinal problems? Or could he have had syphilis, pancreatitis, diabetes or renal papillary necrosis, kidney disease?
After 200 years, a discovery of toxic substances in the locks of the composer’s hair may finally solve the mystery.
This particular story began a few years ago, when researchers realized that DNA analysis had progressed far enough to warrant an examination of hair said to have been cut from Beethoven’s head by anxious fans as he lay dying.
William Meredith, founding director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University began looking for locks at auctions and in museums. Eventually, he and his colleagues ended up with five locks that DNA analysis confirmed came from the composer’s head.
Kevin Brownan Australian businessman with a passion for Beethoven, had three of the locks and wanted to honor Beethoven Application in 1802 so that when he died the doctors could try to figure out why he was so sick. Mr. Brown sent two locks to a specialized lab at the Mayo Clinic that has the equipment and expertise to test for heavy metals.
The result, said Paul Jannetto, the director of the laboratory, was surprising. One of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micrograms of lead per gram of hair and the other had 380 micrograms.
A normal level in hair is less than 4 micrograms of lead per gram.
“It certainly shows that Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” said Dr. Jannetto.
“These are the highest prices on hair I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We get samples from all over the world and these prices are an order of magnitude higher.”
Beethoven’s hair also had arsenic levels 13 times normal and mercury levels 4 times normal. But high amounts of lead, in particular, could be causing many of his illnesses, Dr. Jannetto said.
The researchers, including Drs. Jannetto, Brown and Dr. Meredith, describe their findings in a letter was published Monday in the journal Clinical Chemistry.
The analysis updates a report from last year, when the same group said Beethoven did not have lead poisoning. Now with thorough testing they say he had enough lead in his system to at least explain his deafness and ailments.
David Eaton, a toxicologist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, said Beethoven’s gastrointestinal problems were “completely consistent with lead poisoning.” As for Beethoven’s deafness, he added, high doses of lead affect the nervous system and could have destroyed his hearing.
“Whether the chronic dose was enough to kill him is hard to say,” added Dr.
No one is saying that the composer was deliberately poisoned. But Jerome Nriagu, an expert on lead poisoning in history and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, said lead had been used in wine and food in 19th-century Europe, as well as in medicines and salves.
A possible source of Beethoven’s high lead levels was cheap wine. Lead, in the form of lead acetate, also called “sugar of lead”, has a sweet taste. In Beethoven’s time it was often added to poor quality wine to make it taste better.
The wine was also fermented in kettles soldered with lead, which would wash away as the wine aged, Dr Nriagu said. And, he added, the corks on the wine bottles were pre-soaked in lead salt to improve the seal.
Beethoven drank copious amounts of wine, about a bottle a day, and later in life even more, believing it was good for his health, and also, Dr. Meredith said, because he had become addicted to it. In the last days before his death at the age of 56 in 1827, his friends gave him wine by the spoonful.
His secretary and biographer, Anton Schindler, described his death scene: “This death struggle was terrible, for his general build, especially his chest, was gigantic. He still drank some of your Rüdesheimer wine in spoonfuls until he died.’
As he lay on his deathbed, his publisher gave him a gift 12 wine bottles. By then Beethoven knew he could never drink them. He whispered his own last recorded words: “Pity, pity – too late!”
For a composer, deafness was perhaps the worst affliction.
At the age of 30, 26 years before his death, Beethoven wrote: “For almost 2 years I have stopped attending any social function, just because I find it impossible to tell people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I could cope with my disability, but in my profession it is a terrible handicap. And if my enemies, of whom I have a great number, heard it, what would they say?’
When he was 32, Beethoven lamented that he could not hear a flute or a shepherd singing, which, He wrote, “it brought me almost to despair. A little more and I would have killed myself — only Art held me back. Ah, it seemed unthinkable to me to leave the world until I had brought out all that I feel is within me.”
Over the years, Beethoven consulted many doctors, trying treatment after treatment for his ailments and his deafness, but found no relief. At one point he was using salves and taking 75 medications, many of which likely contained lead.
In 1823, he wrote to an acquaintance, also deaf, about his own inability to hear, calling it a “grievous misfortune” and noting: “Doctors know little. finally someone got tired of them.”
His Ninth Symphony was probably a way of reconciling his grief with his art.
Ever since he was a teenager, Beethoven had been enchanted by a poem, “Ode to Joy,” by Friedrich Schiller.
He set the poem to music in the Ninth, sung by soloists and a chorus – considered the first instance of song in a symphony. It was the climax of the arrangement, depicting the pursuit of joy.
The first movement is a depiction of despair, wrote Beethoven. The second movement, with its powerful kettle drums, is an attempt to overcome despair. The third reveals a “tender” world where despair is cast aside, Beethoven wrote. But pushing aside despair wasn’t enough, he concluded. Instead, “we must look for something that calls us to life.”
The finale, the fourth movement, was this call. It was the Ode to Joy.
Over the years, Beethoven’s Ninth has deeply moved even millions Helen Keller who “heard” it by pressing her hand to a radio:
As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling the whole room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I admired the strength of his unquenchable spirit by which out of his pain he made such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the wonderful harmony that burst like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.