In his will, Beethoven made a request. 200 years later, scientists fulfilled it

Analyzes of the classical composer’s DNA reveal mysteries about his life that fans never thought would be solved. At least, not two centuries after his death.

In the will he left to his brothers 25 years before he died in 1827, Beethoven asked them to let the public know, after his death, details about his state of health.

It is known today that at the age of 40 the musician was completely deaf. In a letter to his brothers, cited by , Beethoven says he was “irremediably distressed” by this diagnosis, and explains that he had even considered suicide.

However, the remaining problems that led to his death were still covered in mystery.

“Our main objective was clarify Beethoven’s health problemswhich include progressive hearing loss, which began in his mid-20s and eventually led to him becoming functionally deaf in 1818,” explained the biochemist John Krause, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany, in a press release published last year.

From the age of 22, the composer also began to suffer from severe abdominal pain and chronic diarrhea. And six years before his death, the first signs of liver diseasewhich is thought to have been, at least in part, responsible for his early death, at the age of 56.

Many causes were given for the musician’s death, and it was even believed that it could have been caused by drinking alcohol (which would have caused poisoning), but this theory was abandoned — the musician’s hair had been mistaken for a woman’s.

It is known, through several locks confirmed to be much more likely to be from the composer’s head, that his death was probably the result of a hepatitis B infectionincreased by alcohol consumption and other risk factors for liver disease.

“We have not been able to find a definitive cause for Beethoven’s deafness or his gastrointestinal problems,” says Krause. And it was when it was already thought that the investigation was going nowhere, there was a hidden surprise, reserved for the end.

Comparing the Y chromosome of hair samples with those of modern relatives descended from Beethoven’s paternal linethe analyzes point to an incompatibility.

According to Science Alert, this suggests extramarital sexual activity in the generations that preceded the composer’s birth. I.e, someone in Beethoven’s family was unfaithful, which resulted in chromosome changes in the composer’s lineage.

“This discovery suggests a event of extraparental paternity in his paternal line between the conception of Hendrik van Beethoven in Kampenhout, Belgium, in about 1572, and the conception of Ludwig van Beethoven seven generations later, in 1770, in Bonn, Germany”, Tristan Begganthropologist at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, and coordinator of .

Although it doesn’t seem like this was what the young musician meant when he wrote his will, his fans now know, almost 200 years after his death, the secrets that even Beethoven himself could ignore. What other mysteries hide the hairs of one of the most famous composers in the world?