The skull has its own complicated history. Beethoven’s remains were moved and disturbed on multiple occasions in the decades after his death, first when he was reinterred in a new cemetery in 1863 and again when the remains were moved to the Vienna Central Cemetery in 1888. During these transfers, bones were handled by researchers and collectors who had varying degrees of care and varying intentions. Skull fragments were taken as relics, and some of these fragments found their way into private and institutional collections, where they have been subject to various analyses. The lead study conducted by Christian Reiter used bone fragments from the skull, and the 2024 lead study using the authenticated hair locks from the 2023 study provided a cross-check against the authenticated material.
The 2023 study’s researchers were aware of these complications. They noted that the skull fragments available for research could not be authenticated with the same confidence as the hair, because the chain of custody of the skull fragments was more disrupted and because there was no equivalent of the five-sample matching test that worked so effectively for the hair. Hair, despite its disadvantages as a genetic substrate, turned out to be more straightforwardly authenticatable in this case precisely because multiple independently held samples could be compared.
—
## The People Who Kept the Locks
Behind the genetic analysis of the 2023 study are the collectors and institutions who preserved the locks of hair for nearly two centuries. Their stories are worth tracing not only for the provenance they establish but for what they reveal about the networks of musicians, scholars, and admirers who kept Beethoven’s memory alive between his death in 1827 and the modern era.