This Day in Classical Music History (Mysterious Beethoven Death Solved?)

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.