March 26, 1827—Late in the afternoon, lightning
streaks illuminated the room where Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying. The composer, as defiant toward the elements and
death as he had been all his life toward musical and social convention, raised
and shook his fist at the storm raging outside, then, exhausted from the
struggle, slumped back and perished.
After 20,000 lined the streets of Vienna to pay
final tribute at his funeral, questions began to crop up about the cause
of death. Foul play didn’t come up, mind you, but all kinds of other
possibilities did, especially because of the ill health with which the composer
struggled so long.
Beethoven had been caught in a rainstorm a few months
previously and he had never been the same afterward, so pneumonia was one
logical cause of death. But over the years, some wondered about dropsy, a
condition involving an accumulation of diluted lymph in body tissues
and cavities. Some mentioned alcoholic cirrhosis, infectious hepatitis, sarcoidosis
and Whipple's disease. Still others speculated darkly about syphilis, a disease
that, before Paul Ehrlich’s discovery of the “magic bullet” that would kill the
microbe bearing the condition but not the patient, involved shame for its
sufferers and their families. Syphilis, it was suggested, could have caused the
deafness that altered the course of the composer’s life.
Over the last decade, what appears to be a solution
to the mystery was proposed. It came not from a musicologist, a
historian/biographer, nor even a doctor, but from the U.S. Department of
Energy.
The medical detective work began with strands of the
composer’s hair clipped from his head the day after his death by the young
musician Frederick Hiller. The precious relics stayed through several
generations of Hiller’s family until after World War II, when they presented it
to the Danish physician Kay Fremming in gratitude for his work on behalf of Jews. After his death, they were purchased by four American admirers of the
composer.
Now, a question might be popping into the heads of
Tea Party sympathizers (even some who aren’t): Why on earth was the Department
of Energy concerning itself with this rather than, say, diminishing American
reliance on foreign oil? Well, as one of the medical detectives, Dr. William
Walsh, explained it in a PBS interview in 2005, his collaborator on the process was studying how bacteria can take
lead and other toxins out of the environment, while he himself was trying to
understand the causes of autism and Alzheimer's Disease.
The researchers were able to dispense with the most sensational
hypothesis of Beethoven’s cause of death. They found no traces of mercury, the
most common treatment in those days for syphilis.
But the medical detectives came up with a connection
between Beethoven’s death and the physical agonies that began to plague him in
his early-to-mid-twenties. None of the many doctors he consulted could
alleviate his terrible abdominal pain. By the age of 29, he was writing his
brother that he had contemplated suicide over the condition.
Using DNA analysis of the strands from Beethoven’s hair
as well as a fragment of his skull, Dr. Walsh, an expert in forensic analysis, concluded that Beethoven's misery had been caused by lead poisoning. The composer might not necessarily
have even been exposed to high levels of this, but if he could not eliminate
the poisons from his system, they would have accumulated over time. It might have contributed to his death as well.
The work of Dr. Walsh might explain much, but it
also opens another avenue of speculation: for instance, on Beethoven’s level of
productivity compared to other greats of the classical era, Frank Joseph Haydn
and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In a college music humanities class, our instructor
had pointed to the number of symphonies this trio had composed: Haydn, 106;
Mozart, 41 that are formally numbered; Beethoven, only eight. That last total,
the instructor explained, came about because Beethoven was attempting not so much
to complete a composition as to utterly transform a particular musical form.
The more recent medical diagnosis makes one wonder
about the suggestion by my instructor. What if Beethoven was not simply being
perfectionist, but was also horribly distracted by his medical condition?
Traditionally, it’s been Beethoven’s deafness that has been cited as a contributing cause of his depression and irritability. The lead poisoning diagnosis fills out the picture, but there’s one thing it can’t do: account for the composer’s refusal to take any drug that might dull his mind during composition, or explain the courage he needed to surmount his frailty.
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