For Begg’s team, this passage from 1802 became one of the ethical anchors for their work. Johannes Krause, the director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute and a senior author of the study, described the Heiligenstadt Testament’s language as about “as good as it goes” when it comes to obtaining consent from a historical figure. It was not a formal consent document in any modern sense. But it was a documented wish, in the composer’s own words, that his health be understood—which is precisely what the 2023 study set out to do.
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## The Locks and Their Histories
Hair has been cut from the heads of the famous and kept as relics for as long as there have been famous people. In the nineteenth century, the practice was common, intimate, and deeply sentimental. Mourners cut hair from the deceased at wakes and funerals. Admirers sought locks from artists and composers as tokens of proximity to genius. Locks were framed, pressed into lockets, sent in letters, and annotated with dates and names in the confident assumption that their provenance was certain.
The problem is that provenance is only as reliable as the people who vouched for it, and memories, stories, and labels attached to locks of hair can be mistaken, embellished, or entirely invented without anyone intending to deceive. A lock labeled “Beethoven’s hair” in 1830 might have been cut from his head at his deathbed, or it might have been cut by someone who thought it came from his head, or it might have passed through enough hands to lose its reliable chain of custody entirely.