AS ANYONE watching the BBC’s excellent three-part dramatisation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s life will know, after the great composer died his head was stripped of hair by souvenir hunters eager to possess a physical fragment of the great maestro. It’s a gruesome thought but one indicative of the level of celebrity he enjoyed — or perhaps endured — during his lifetime.
One of those hunters was a young music student named Ferdinand Hiller, who preserved his follicular memento in a locket. Beethoven’s Hair (BBC Two), the somewhat bald title of last night’s programme, followed the 200-year journey of that cluster of greying curls (582 of them, to be precise), all the way from 19th-century Vienna to present-day Arizona. None of the central information in the film was especially new (the lock was purchased by its current owners at Sotheby ‘s in 1994 for £3,600 and the results of scientific testing published in 2000), but the director Harry Weinstein managed to refresh the story by interweaving the hair’s progress with contemporary events.
As with all current history programmes, no tale can be left unreconstructed. Thus we saw the young Hiller, in lavish period costume, cautiously approaching a large wooden bed in which a man with sunken cheeks and — you guessed it — wild, curly locks lay dying. Timorously, the 15-year-old bends his ear to the great man’s lips. “Dedicate your life entirely to art” he is told, dramatically, and with that Beethoven returns to the pressing business of expiring.
Such hyperbole was excusable, however, because the reality of the story was just as enthralling, if not more so, than the fantasy. Back in the present, an improbably named Mexican/American urologist called Che Guevara showed the cameras into his airy, American home. The centrepiece of his ranch-style villa was a sweeping staircase, the railings of which describe the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “Da-da-da-daa”, Che’s wife intoned helpfully. “Da-da-daa.” Che’s equally improbably named partner is Ira Brilliant, founder of the eponymous Centre for Beethoven studies and avid collector of Beethoven memorabilia.
If Michael Jackson’s recent trial proved anything, it was that for fans — true fans — no detail of their idol’s life is too trivial (or too sordid). For Ira and Che, the thought of owning a real lock of Beethoven’s hair was a tantalising dream come true, made even more exciting by the prospect of a scientific breakthrough. These were men who loved the composer so much that they held an annual birthday party for him, complete with cake, candles, a mariachi band and tuneless rendition of “Happy Birthday dear Ludwig”.
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But before we could get that far, we returned to the costume department for more historical re-enactment. These were well-travelled tresses, and the programme’s intention was to show how their journey, like Beethoven’s music, was bound up in the history of Europe. After his death, Hiller passed the lock to his son Paul. It then disappeared, only to resurface in Denmark during the Second World War. We travelled to the bell-tower of a Danish fishing village where, in 1943, Jewish families hid from the Nazis. A local doctor treated them during the night, anaesthetising the smallest Jewish children so that they wouldn’t cry out and alert the Germans to their presence — a small, touching detail in a programme made up of small, touching details. The lock remained in Denmark, passing to the doctor’s heirs and thence to Sotheby’s, where Ira and Che snapped it up.
Its final destination was a laboratory where individual strands were analysed to ascertain the cause of Beethoven’s persistent ill-health and, of course, his deafness. But first, another brief and fascinating detour, to a high security jail where the resident pathologist explained how abnormal levels of heavy metals (mercury, lead and so on) have been found in especially violent criminals (Charles Manson and the like). In Beethoven’s case, the culprit was lead — 100 times the safe amount — which explained his excruciating stomach pains but not, sadly, the deafness.
A last detail revealed that around the age of 18, Beethoven had spent a prolonged spell in a health spa, where he had drunk deeply of, and bathed in, mineral waters. Might that have been what caused his lead poisoning? Who knows. But it just goes to show that then, as now, crank cures are best avoided.