The Moscheles Lock has a comparably specific history. Anton Schindler—Beethoven’s sometimes disputed but extensively documented secretary and biographer—cut a lock of hair from Beethoven’s head two days before the composer died and sent it to the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles in London. The Moscheles family preserved the lock, and it passed eventually to Moscheles’s son Felix, then to the Berlin antiquarian dealer Leo Liepmannssohn in 1911, then to the violinist Louis Krasner, and eventually to the American Beethoven Society, which holds it at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University.
The Halm-Thayer Lock has its own documented story, and it comes with an anecdote that reveals something characteristic about its subject. Beethoven was known, occasionally, to make gifts of hair to admirers and correspondents. He was also known to substitute a joke object for the actual hair. In one documented case, he sent a correspondent a clipping of a goat’s beard in place of his own hair—apparently a private act of absurdist humor at the expense of the relic trade. The Halm-Thayer Lock, which Beethoven sent in 1826 to the musician Anton Halm, was acquired after the goat’s beard incident and represents a later, presumably genuine gift. The lock subsequently passed to the American biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer, whose descendants held it until the American Beethoven Society acquired it in 2017, along with the Bermann Lock.
The Müller Lock traveled from the Streicher family to a collector named Elise Müller, then to the Swiss collector Hans Conrad Bodmer, and finally to the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, where it is held today.