From Amazon
As Ferdinand Hiller stood beside Beethoven's coffin he asked whether he could cut off a lock of the master composer's hair. In the days before the invention of photography this was not an unusual request; in fact it was common for people to keep locks of hair as remembrances of those who had died. The historical keepsake continued to be passed down subsequent generations of the Hiller family, until years later the heirloom (pun intended) mysteriously came into the possession of a Danish doctor who had been involved in helping hundreds of Jews forced into hiding from the Gestapo during World War II. Who handed the antiquity to the doctor, and why, is just one of the riddles thrown up by a treasure trail that spans two centuries and touches countless lives.
Beethoven's Hair is a historical jigsaw painstakingly pieced together by Russell Martin (author of the highly acclaimed Out of Silence who discovers that as the macabre memento travels through time it has a profound effect on the people who become intrinsically linked by its existence. Revered by Beethoven enthusiasts around the world, the historical lock is considered a true relic that keeps "the spirit of [Beethoven] present and somehow wonderfully alive". As does Martin's book, by sporadically transporting the reader back to 19th-century Vienna for a colourful glimpse of the great composer's life. And now, thanks to modern-day DNA testing, previously unknown secrets about the man who became a musical genius can be revealed. This is a fascinating read. --Christopher Kelly --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Six years ago an improbable pairDretired real-estate developer Ira Brilliant and a Mexican-American doctor named (remarkably) Che GuevaraDgot together to buy a lock of hair that was snipped from Beethoven's head on his deathbed by a young musician. The hair, enclosed in a glass locket, passed through the musician's family, then, during WWII, into the possession of a Danish doctor who helped smuggle Jews through Denmark into safety in Sweden. When the doctor's daughter put the locket up for sale through Sotheby's in London, Brilliant and Guevara, ardent collectors of Beethoven memorabilia, pooled their resources to buy it. They acquired it for a little over $7,000. After recounting these events in detail, Martin moves on to the "newsy" last third of the book: the two collectors submitted the hair to the most up-to-date DNA analysis, with results they and their publisher regarded as so earth shaking that the book was originally embargoed, lest word of its revelations should leak prematurely. The results, however, do not seem particularly startling, though they shed an interesting light on Beethoven's artistic integrity and the cause of his lifelong ill health. For one thing, the analysts found no trace of morphine, suggesting that the composer, often in great pain, foreswore its use so as to keep his mind clear for his work. They also found abnormally high concentrations of lead, indicating that at some time in his life Beethoven may have been subjected to lead poisoning, which would account for many of his health problems, including his deafness. That's hardly enough to make a book, however, and Martin's account is padded with a great deal of repetitious material on the collectors themselves, a long passage on the Jewish escape from Denmark and familiar tales from the composer's life. Ultimately, the book comes off as a scholarly article that got out of hand. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Lead poisoning, eh? Where was OSHA when Western music needed it? Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Russell Martin's brilliant tale about a long-treasured and peripatetic lock of Beethoven's hair paints a compelling portrait of the immortal composer's life, the high drama of Nazi persecution during World War II, and the mysterious world of contemporary forensic science, which is filled with subtle miracles."
--Todd Siler, author of Think Like a Genius
"An engrossing tale . . . When, toward the end of the book, the author writes of DNA tests on the hair that reveal new answers to the causes of Beethoven's deafness and death, even the skeptic will share his enthusiasm for this peculiar subject. First-class history, and a fascinating exposition of forensic science."
--Kirkus Reviews
--Todd Siler, author of Think Like a Genius
"An engrossing tale . . . When, toward the end of the book, the author writes of DNA tests on the hair that reveal new answers to the causes of Beethoven's deafness and death, even the skeptic will share his enthusiasm for this peculiar subject. First-class history, and a fascinating exposition of forensic science."
--Kirkus Reviews
Book Description
Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beethoven's death. By the time he was buried, Beethoven's head had been nearly shorn by the many people who similarly had wanted a lasting memento of the great man. Such was his powerful effect on all those who had heard his music.
For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, and perhaps was destined to end up sequestered in a bank vault, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, during the darkest days of the Second World War. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. Who gave him the hair, and why? And what was the fate of those refugees, holed up in the attic of Gilleleje's church?
After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are startling, and are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.
In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, an Indiana Jones-like tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.
An astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.
For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, and perhaps was destined to end up sequestered in a bank vault, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, during the darkest days of the Second World War. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. Who gave him the hair, and why? And what was the fate of those refugees, holed up in the attic of Gilleleje's church?
After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are startling, and are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.
In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, an Indiana Jones-like tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.
An astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.
From the Back Cover
"Russell Martin's brilliant tale about a long-treasured and peripatetic lock of Beethoven's hair paints a compelling portrait of the immortal composer's life, the high drama of Nazi persecution during World War II, and the mysterious world of contemporary forensic science, which is filled with subtle miracles."
--Todd Siler, author of Think Like a Genius
"An engrossing tale . . . When, toward the end of the book, the author writes of DNA tests on the hair that reveal new answers to the causes of Beethoven's deafness and death, even the skeptic will share his enthusiasm for this peculiar subject. First-class history, and a fascinating exposition of forensic science."
--Kirkus Reviews
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
--Todd Siler, author of Think Like a Genius
"An engrossing tale . . . When, toward the end of the book, the author writes of DNA tests on the hair that reveal new answers to the causes of Beethoven's deafness and death, even the skeptic will share his enthusiasm for this peculiar subject. First-class history, and a fascinating exposition of forensic science."
--Kirkus Reviews
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Russell Martin is the author of five works of nonfiction, including the highly acclaimed Out of Silence, and a novel. He lives in Colorado.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Boy Who Snipped the Lock
It was not until 1871 that Kapellmeister Ferdinand Hiller, the corpulent dean of music in the Rhine-side city of Cologne, first described for fascinated German readers what it had been like to meet Ludwig van Beethoven and what, in fact, the circumstances of the master composer's final days had been. "I can scarcely blame myself, much as I regret it, for not taking down more extended notes than I did," sixty-year-old Hiller wrote. "Indeed, I rejoice that a lad of fifteen years who found himself in a great city for the first time was self-possessed enough to regard any details. [But] I can vouch with the best conscience for the perfect accuracy of all that I am able to repeat."
Ferdinand Hiller had made the snow-slowed journey from Weimar to musical, magical Vienna with his piano and composition instructor, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, in the early spring of 1827 because Hummel had heard the now far-flung news that his old friend and musical rival was dying. He had wanted to see and embrace Beethoven again before he was gone, and too, he had hoped his talented protege might be inspired by at least a few minutes spent in the company of incontestable greatness. Beethoven had received the two men warmly on March 8 and had satisfied them that their company would be efficacious in fact; they stayed with him for hours that day, then returned three more times during the succeeding fortnight before Beethoven finally succumbed to a diseased liver and a life of relentless pain. Yet on that first day, Hiller remembered, the dying man still had seemed very much alive:
Through a spacious anteroom in which high cabinets were piled with thick, tied-up parcels of music, we reached--how my heart beat!--Beethoven's living-room, and were not a little astonished to find the master sitting in apparent comfort at the window. He wore a long, gray sleeping-robe and high boots reaching to his knees. Emaciated by long and severe illness, he seemed to me, when he arose, of tall stature; he was unshaven, his thick, half-gray hair fell in disorder over his temples. The expression of his features heightened when he caught sight of Hummel, and he seemed to be extraordinarily glad to see him. The two men embraced each other most cordially. Hummel introduced me. Beethoven showed himself extremely kind and I was permitted to sit opposite him at the window. . . .
[In order for him to carry on a conversation,] thick sheets of ordinary writing paper in quarto form and lead pencils lay near him at all times. How painful it must have been for the animated, easily impatient man to be obliged to wait for every answer, to make a pause in every moment of conversation, during which, as it were, thought was condemned to come to a standstill! He always followed the hand of the writer with hungry eyes and comprehended what was written at a glance instead of reading it. . . . The conversation at first turned, as usual, on domestic affairs--the journey and sojourn, my relations with Hummel, and matters of that kind. Beethoven asked about Goethe's health with extraordinary solicitude and we were able to make the best of reports, since only a few days before the great poet had written in my album.
Concerning his own poor state, poor Beethoven complained much. "Here I have been lying for four months," he cried out, "one must at last lose patience!" Other things in Vienna did not seem to be to his liking and he spoke with the utmost severity of "the present taste in art" and "the dilettantism that is ruining everything." Nor did he spare the government, up to the highest levels. . . . "Little thieves are hanged, but big ones are allowed to go free!" he exclaimed in ill humor. He asked about my studies and, encouraging me, said, "art must be propagated ceaselessly," and when I spoke of the exclusive interest in Italian opera that then prevailed in Vienna, he gave utterance to the memorable words, "It is said vox populi, vox dei. I never believed it."
On March 13, Hummel took me with him a second time to Beethoven. We found his condition to be materially worse. He lay in bed, seemed to suffer great pains, and at intervals groaned deeply despite the fact that he spoke much and animatedly. . . . He also begged of Hummel to bring his wife to see him; she had not come with us, for she had not been able to persuade herself to see in his present state the man whom she had known at the zenith of his powers. A short time before, he had received a present of a picture of the house in which Haydn was born. He kept it close at hand and showed it to us. "It gives me a childish pleasure," he said, "the cradle of so great a man!"
Shortly after our second visit, the report spread throughout Vienna that the Philharmonic Society of London had sent Beethoven L100 in order to ease his sickbed. It was added that this surprise had made so great an impression on the poor man that it had also brought physical relief. When we stood again at his bedside on the 20th, we could deduce from his utterances how greatly he had been rejoiced by this altruism, but he was very weak and spoke only in faint and disconnected phrases. "I shall, no doubt, soon be going above," he whispered after our greeting. Similar remarks recurred frequently. In the intervals, however, he spoke of projects and hopes that were destined not to be realized. Speaking of the noble conduct of the Philharmonic Society and in praise of the English people, he expressed the intention, as soon as matters were better with him, to undertake the journey to London. "I will compose a grand overture for them, and a symphony." Then too, he told Frau Hummel, who had joined her husband that day, that he would visit her and go to I do not know how many places. His eyes, which were still lively when we saw him on our previous visit, were closed now, and it was difficult from time to time for him to raise himself. It was no longer possible to deceive one's self--the worst was to be feared.
Hopeless was the picture presented by the extraordinary man when we saw him again on March 23rd. It was to be the last time. He lay, weak and miserable, sighing deeply at intervals. Not a word fell from his lips; sweat stood out on his forehead. His handkerchief not being conveniently at hand, Hummel's wife took her fine cambric handkerchief and dried his face again and again. Never shall I forget the grateful glance with which his broken eyes looked upon her.
On a Monday evening three days hence, Hiller and both Hummels were dining at the home of friends when additional guests arrived with the woeful news that Beethoven had died in the midst of the sudden afternoon storm. When Hummel and the boy returned to the lodging called the Scbwarzspanierhaus, the "Black Spaniard's House," on Tuesday to pay their final respects, the face of the man whom Hummel loved and young Hiller newly was in awe of appeared strangely changed. Beethoven's body still lay in his bedroom, but now had been placed in an oak coffin that stood on a brass bier, his head resting on a white silk pillow. His long hair had been combed and was crowned with a wreath of white roses, but his grizzled visage had gone blue and the sides of his face were oddly sunken because at autopsy that morning the temporal bones surrounding his ears--as well as small bones of the ears themselves--had been removed for future study.
The autopsy had been performed by Dr. Johannes Wagner, a pathologist and associate of Beethoven's final physician, Dr. Andreas Wawruch, who had assisted him. During the methodical morning procedure, the two men had discovered that Beethoven's liver, shrunk to half the size of a healthy one, was leathery and covered with nodules; the spleen was black and tough and twice its normal size; the pancreas too was unusually large and hard; and each of the pale kidneys contained numerous calcified stones. The deaf man's auditory nerves were shriveled and marrowless, but the nearby facial nerves were impressively large; the auditory arteries were "dilated to more than the size of a crow's quill" and had become surprisingly brittle; the bone of the skull was strangely dense, and the remarkably white and fluid-filled convolutions of the brain were much deeper, wider, and more numerous than the physicians would have expected them to be. The two doctors had not been surprised, of course, when they encountered much that was abnormal, but knowledge of both pathology and disease etiology remained limited enough in that era that neither man could infer from the findings what might have caused the composer's deafness or indeed any of his many other maladies.
Because of the trauma induced by the autopsy itself, as well as the disfigurement of his face caused by the missing bones, Beethoven appeared only suggestive of the man with whom Hummel and Ferdinand Hiller had conversed a few days earlier, and the two men did not remain for long beside his coffin. But before they departed, young Hiller asked his mentor whether he might be permitted to cut a lock of the master composer's hair. It was a request that Hiller would choose not to mention in his 1871 recollection--perhaps reluctant to detail or acknowledge it, even half a century later, because throughout his life the otherwise open and gregarious Hiller virtually never had spoken about his private life or what he secretly held dear, but perhaps also because explicit permission to take a keepsake had not been granted by Beethoven's brother Johann, by Stephan von Breuning, who had become executor of his estate, or even by the factotum Anton Schindler. Yet other locks of hair, it was obvious, had been cut already, and it is easy to imagine Hummel whispering his assent to his student, the two men quietly moved by the simple ritual and the sadness of the moment, Ferdinand Hiller wielding the scissors he had brought with him for that hopeful purpose, lifting a thick lock of Beethoven's long and half-gray hair, pulling it away from his head, and se...
It was not until 1871 that Kapellmeister Ferdinand Hiller, the corpulent dean of music in the Rhine-side city of Cologne, first described for fascinated German readers what it had been like to meet Ludwig van Beethoven and what, in fact, the circumstances of the master composer's final days had been. "I can scarcely blame myself, much as I regret it, for not taking down more extended notes than I did," sixty-year-old Hiller wrote. "Indeed, I rejoice that a lad of fifteen years who found himself in a great city for the first time was self-possessed enough to regard any details. [But] I can vouch with the best conscience for the perfect accuracy of all that I am able to repeat."
Ferdinand Hiller had made the snow-slowed journey from Weimar to musical, magical Vienna with his piano and composition instructor, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, in the early spring of 1827 because Hummel had heard the now far-flung news that his old friend and musical rival was dying. He had wanted to see and embrace Beethoven again before he was gone, and too, he had hoped his talented protege might be inspired by at least a few minutes spent in the company of incontestable greatness. Beethoven had received the two men warmly on March 8 and had satisfied them that their company would be efficacious in fact; they stayed with him for hours that day, then returned three more times during the succeeding fortnight before Beethoven finally succumbed to a diseased liver and a life of relentless pain. Yet on that first day, Hiller remembered, the dying man still had seemed very much alive:
Through a spacious anteroom in which high cabinets were piled with thick, tied-up parcels of music, we reached--how my heart beat!--Beethoven's living-room, and were not a little astonished to find the master sitting in apparent comfort at the window. He wore a long, gray sleeping-robe and high boots reaching to his knees. Emaciated by long and severe illness, he seemed to me, when he arose, of tall stature; he was unshaven, his thick, half-gray hair fell in disorder over his temples. The expression of his features heightened when he caught sight of Hummel, and he seemed to be extraordinarily glad to see him. The two men embraced each other most cordially. Hummel introduced me. Beethoven showed himself extremely kind and I was permitted to sit opposite him at the window. . . .
[In order for him to carry on a conversation,] thick sheets of ordinary writing paper in quarto form and lead pencils lay near him at all times. How painful it must have been for the animated, easily impatient man to be obliged to wait for every answer, to make a pause in every moment of conversation, during which, as it were, thought was condemned to come to a standstill! He always followed the hand of the writer with hungry eyes and comprehended what was written at a glance instead of reading it. . . . The conversation at first turned, as usual, on domestic affairs--the journey and sojourn, my relations with Hummel, and matters of that kind. Beethoven asked about Goethe's health with extraordinary solicitude and we were able to make the best of reports, since only a few days before the great poet had written in my album.
Concerning his own poor state, poor Beethoven complained much. "Here I have been lying for four months," he cried out, "one must at last lose patience!" Other things in Vienna did not seem to be to his liking and he spoke with the utmost severity of "the present taste in art" and "the dilettantism that is ruining everything." Nor did he spare the government, up to the highest levels. . . . "Little thieves are hanged, but big ones are allowed to go free!" he exclaimed in ill humor. He asked about my studies and, encouraging me, said, "art must be propagated ceaselessly," and when I spoke of the exclusive interest in Italian opera that then prevailed in Vienna, he gave utterance to the memorable words, "It is said vox populi, vox dei. I never believed it."
On March 13, Hummel took me with him a second time to Beethoven. We found his condition to be materially worse. He lay in bed, seemed to suffer great pains, and at intervals groaned deeply despite the fact that he spoke much and animatedly. . . . He also begged of Hummel to bring his wife to see him; she had not come with us, for she had not been able to persuade herself to see in his present state the man whom she had known at the zenith of his powers. A short time before, he had received a present of a picture of the house in which Haydn was born. He kept it close at hand and showed it to us. "It gives me a childish pleasure," he said, "the cradle of so great a man!"
Shortly after our second visit, the report spread throughout Vienna that the Philharmonic Society of London had sent Beethoven L100 in order to ease his sickbed. It was added that this surprise had made so great an impression on the poor man that it had also brought physical relief. When we stood again at his bedside on the 20th, we could deduce from his utterances how greatly he had been rejoiced by this altruism, but he was very weak and spoke only in faint and disconnected phrases. "I shall, no doubt, soon be going above," he whispered after our greeting. Similar remarks recurred frequently. In the intervals, however, he spoke of projects and hopes that were destined not to be realized. Speaking of the noble conduct of the Philharmonic Society and in praise of the English people, he expressed the intention, as soon as matters were better with him, to undertake the journey to London. "I will compose a grand overture for them, and a symphony." Then too, he told Frau Hummel, who had joined her husband that day, that he would visit her and go to I do not know how many places. His eyes, which were still lively when we saw him on our previous visit, were closed now, and it was difficult from time to time for him to raise himself. It was no longer possible to deceive one's self--the worst was to be feared.
Hopeless was the picture presented by the extraordinary man when we saw him again on March 23rd. It was to be the last time. He lay, weak and miserable, sighing deeply at intervals. Not a word fell from his lips; sweat stood out on his forehead. His handkerchief not being conveniently at hand, Hummel's wife took her fine cambric handkerchief and dried his face again and again. Never shall I forget the grateful glance with which his broken eyes looked upon her.
On a Monday evening three days hence, Hiller and both Hummels were dining at the home of friends when additional guests arrived with the woeful news that Beethoven had died in the midst of the sudden afternoon storm. When Hummel and the boy returned to the lodging called the Scbwarzspanierhaus, the "Black Spaniard's House," on Tuesday to pay their final respects, the face of the man whom Hummel loved and young Hiller newly was in awe of appeared strangely changed. Beethoven's body still lay in his bedroom, but now had been placed in an oak coffin that stood on a brass bier, his head resting on a white silk pillow. His long hair had been combed and was crowned with a wreath of white roses, but his grizzled visage had gone blue and the sides of his face were oddly sunken because at autopsy that morning the temporal bones surrounding his ears--as well as small bones of the ears themselves--had been removed for future study.
The autopsy had been performed by Dr. Johannes Wagner, a pathologist and associate of Beethoven's final physician, Dr. Andreas Wawruch, who had assisted him. During the methodical morning procedure, the two men had discovered that Beethoven's liver, shrunk to half the size of a healthy one, was leathery and covered with nodules; the spleen was black and tough and twice its normal size; the pancreas too was unusually large and hard; and each of the pale kidneys contained numerous calcified stones. The deaf man's auditory nerves were shriveled and marrowless, but the nearby facial nerves were impressively large; the auditory arteries were "dilated to more than the size of a crow's quill" and had become surprisingly brittle; the bone of the skull was strangely dense, and the remarkably white and fluid-filled convolutions of the brain were much deeper, wider, and more numerous than the physicians would have expected them to be. The two doctors had not been surprised, of course, when they encountered much that was abnormal, but knowledge of both pathology and disease etiology remained limited enough in that era that neither man could infer from the findings what might have caused the composer's deafness or indeed any of his many other maladies.
Because of the trauma induced by the autopsy itself, as well as the disfigurement of his face caused by the missing bones, Beethoven appeared only suggestive of the man with whom Hummel and Ferdinand Hiller had conversed a few days earlier, and the two men did not remain for long beside his coffin. But before they departed, young Hiller asked his mentor whether he might be permitted to cut a lock of the master composer's hair. It was a request that Hiller would choose not to mention in his 1871 recollection--perhaps reluctant to detail or acknowledge it, even half a century later, because throughout his life the otherwise open and gregarious Hiller virtually never had spoken about his private life or what he secretly held dear, but perhaps also because explicit permission to take a keepsake had not been granted by Beethoven's brother Johann, by Stephan von Breuning, who had become executor of his estate, or even by the factotum Anton Schindler. Yet other locks of hair, it was obvious, had been cut already, and it is easy to imagine Hummel whispering his assent to his student, the two men quietly moved by the simple ritual and the sadness of the moment, Ferdinand Hiller wielding the scissors he had brought with him for that hopeful purpose, lifting a thick lock of Beethoven's long and half-gray hair, pulling it away from his head, and se...
