A recent study published on Wednesday revealed some surprising results on the genetic makeup and medical history of the legendary composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
Thanks to the popular Victorian practice of keeping locks of hair from deceased loved ones as keepsakes, international researchers were able to perform genomic analyses of Beethoven’s hair. Their findings were published on March 22 in the journal Current Biology.
Despite having a reputation today as one of the most important composers in the Western classical music tradition, Beethoven suffered various medical afflictions throughout his career. At the age of 28, he started to go deaf. He also struggled with gastrointestinal issues until his death from liver disease at the age of 56 in 1827.
The sequencing of Beethoven’s genome brought a new understanding of his medical problems and even unearthed a family secret.
One medical insight gleaned from the analyses is that Beethoven contracted Hepatitis B in the months before his death.
Hepatitis B is spread when the body fluids of an infected person enter the body of another, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Combined with a genetic predisposition for liver disease and Beethoven’s reportedly regular consumption of alcohol, this infection severely damaged his liver.
According to the study, Beethoven began showing symptoms of liver disease in 1821, including jaundice. Yet his gastrointestinal issues appear to have begun much earlier when he was 22 years old.
The study did not provide conclusive answers to the mysteries surrounding his gastrointestinal problems, but it did rule out celiac disease and lactose intolerance as potential causes.
Likewise, the source of Beethoven’s progressive deafness remains a mystery.
Some scientists believe it was caused by Paget’s disease, which compresses the cranial nerve and could have impacted Beethoven’s hearing. Unfortunately, researchers in this recent study could not test for this disease.
Yet the study did uncover some interesting facts about Beethoven’s family tree.
The researchers compared Beethoven’s genetic material to five supposed male relatives currently living in Belgium, but they discovered that these men were actually not related to Beethoven, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The genome testing results found that their supposed common ancestor — Aert Van Beethoven, born in 1535 — was not related to Beethoven. An “extra-pair-paternity event” in which a man was raising a child that was not his own is believed to have occurred.
An author of the study, Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, a geneticist at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, told The Wall Street Journal that scholars have long questioned the paternity of Beethoven’s father, whose baptismal record has never been found.
With this in mind, the break in the genetic record suggests that Beethoven’s grandmother may have had an extramarital relationship that led to the birth of his father.
Larmuseau told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to continue to look into Beethoven’s lineage, especially as consumer DNA testing could someday reveal some new living relatives.
O.K. what everyone wants to know is if Beethoven was Black. This study proves that the established alleged family lineage is false. Someone had an extra marriage affair. As Texans say, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck.”