For more than a century, a lock of hair in a small oval frame had been known as one of the most treasured relics in Beethoven scholarship. The story attached to it was specific and romantic: it had been cut from the composer’s head shortly after his death in March 1827, given to a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller as a keepsake, and preserved across generations of the Hiller family before eventually passing to the American Beethoven Society. The lock even had a name. Scholars called it the Hiller Lock, and it had been the basis of scientific research into Beethoven’s health—including a widely discussed analysis in 2000 that found extraordinary levels of lead in the hair and concluded that Beethoven may have suffered from serious lead poisoning.
There was only one problem.
When researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and institutions across Europe and the United States extracted DNA from the Hiller Lock as part of a sweeping genomic study published in the journal *Current Biology* in March 2023, the results were immediate and unambiguous. The DNA was female. The Hiller Lock had not come from Ludwig van Beethoven. It had come from a woman—her identity unknown—and every study that had used it as a proxy for Beethoven’s biology had been built on a false foundation.
That finding was the first of two surprises in the study. The second was quieter but in some ways more personal. When researchers compared Beethoven’s authenticated Y-chromosome sequence against those of living men who shared his documented paternal lineage, the chromosomes did not match. Somewhere between a Flemish ancestor named Hendrik van Beethoven, born in 1572, and Ludwig himself, born in 1770, the biological and legal records of the family had diverged.