This is a reminder that the preservation of physical material has consequences that the preservers cannot anticipate. The people who kept the Stumpff Lock in Scotland, the people who held the Moscheles Lock through the Liepmannssohn antiquariat in Berlin, the person who bought the Hiller Lock from a family fleeing wartime Denmark in 1943—none of them could have known that what they were keeping would eventually be used to sequence a genome. They were making decisions about what to keep based on their own frameworks of value, and those decisions, multiplied across many people over many decades, produced the sample set that the 2023 study needed.
The 2024 lead study—using authenticated material from the 2023 study to re-examine Beethoven’s lead exposure on a sound evidential basis—represents another step in this long trajectory. New tools applied to old materials, yielding new findings. The trajectory is likely to continue. The authenticated genome established in 2023 provides a reference standard against which future claimed Beethoven biological material can be tested, and improved genomic analysis tools may extract additional information from the existing authenticated samples.
What does not change is the music. The symphonies, quartets, sonatas, and concertos exist in scores and recordings that are completely independent of the biological material from which the genomic study was conducted. They have been performed and listened to continuously since Beethoven’s death, and the biological findings of the 2023 study do not add to or subtract from them. They are facts of a different kind—not genetic but musical, cultural, and historical in the sense that they have shaped the history of Western music for two centuries.