Music historians have debated the relationship between Beethoven’s deafness and his compositional development. One view holds that his deafness, by cutting him off from the social and performative dimensions of music-making, forced him inward and toward an increasingly abstract, introspective conception of music—the late string quartets, for instance, are works of extraordinary harmonic complexity and emotional depth that were not, in any practical sense, written for public performance in the way his earlier concertos were. Another view cautions against this kind of deterministic reading: composers develop, style changes, and attributing late-period complexity entirely to deafness risks oversimplifying both the biography and the music.
What the 2023 study does not do, and explicitly does not claim to do, is explain the music through the genetics. The study’s genetic findings are findings about disease susceptibility, ancestral origins, and family history. They do not explain why Beethoven composed what he composed, how he heard music internally when he could not hear it externally, or why his work has occupied such a singular place in Western music for two centuries. Jeremy Yudkin of Boston University, commenting on the study, noted that while Beethoven’s health may have influenced his music, “his works matter more than his medical history.”
The music is its own fact. The genome is a different kind of fact. The 2023 study illuminated the second without reducing the first to it.
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## The Hiller Lock’s Unknown Woman
One figure in this story has received almost no attention: the woman whose hair has been kept in an oval frame, labeled as Beethoven’s, for more than a century.