Beethoven died at 56, which was not dramatically young by the standards of the era, but he was widely mourned. His death had been expected for weeks as his illness progressed and as word spread through Vienna’s musical community, and by the time he died on March 26, 1827, there were many people in a position to seek a memento. The locks that survived into the twenty-first century are probably a fraction of what was cut and distributed.
The authentication problem that the 2023 study confronted—determining which of the surviving locks were actually Beethoven’s—is in some ways the scientific version of a problem that has always existed in the relic trade: the relationship between provenance stories and physical reality. A label saying “Beethoven’s hair, cut by Ferdinand Hiller, 1827” is not the same as certainty that the hair is what the label says. Provenance stories can be wrong for many reasons, including simple human error, and they become harder to verify the more time passes. The nineteenth-century relic trade operated largely on trust in the word of reputable people, and that trust was sometimes misplaced even without any intent to deceive.
What makes the 2023 study significant in this context is that it demonstrated a method for bypassing the provenance story entirely. The hair’s DNA can be compared against the DNA of documented relatives, and the match or mismatch tells a story that is independent of what labels and family accounts say. This is a capability that did not exist when the Hiller Lock was acquired in 1994, and its existence means that the authentication question can now be asked and answered in a way that was previously impossible.