Virtuosic pianist and composer Beethoven suffered from several debilitating ailments. A new study suggests lead poisoning may be at least partly to blame.
Ludwig van Beethoven was a prodigious composer. He’s credited with 722 individual works, including symphonies, sonatas, and choral music — creations that pushed the boundaries of composition and performance, and helped usher in the Romantic era of music. But away from the fortepiano, Beethoven’s life was plagued by deafness, debilitating gastrointestinal troubles, and jaundice.
So the owner of two separate locks of Beethoven’s hair put something like two or three dozen strands in a special collection kit and shipped it to the Mayo Clinic — where“I used tweezers,” says Erdahl, who said she felt zero temptation to touch the composer’s hair with her bare hands. “My heart was fluttering and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is so significant.’ When you have that small amount of hair, every strand counts.
The lead levels, on the other hand, were a startling 64 to 95 times higher than the hair of someone today. Jannetto says that even for people of his time period, the lead levels in Beethoven’s hair would have been about 10 times higher than average. “What this showed is he had a chronic exposure to high concentrations of lead,” he says.“A lot of those documented ailments that Beethoven had,” says Jannetto, “those are traditional signs and symptoms that a neurologist or clinician could see in a patient that was exposed to lead.
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