Beethoven asked, in the Heiligenstadt Testament, for his illness to be understood. He did not ask, in 1802, for his genome to be sequenced. He could not have. But the wish he expressed—that the world should understand what he had been dealing with—has been partly honored by scientific work he could not have imagined, using materials that his contemporaries preserved without knowing exactly what they were preserving.
The work continues. The deafness remains unexplained. The woman in the Hiller Lock remains unidentified. The generation in which the paternal line diverged remains unknown. And the Ninth Symphony, composed by a deaf man who asked to be understood, continues to be heard.
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## A Note on the Lock That Was Not His
In the years since the 2023 study was published, the Hiller Lock has continued to be held by institutions affiliated with Beethoven research, though its status has changed entirely. It is no longer a Beethoven relic. It is, instead, a historical artifact of a different kind: a physical object that reveals a piece of nineteenth-century social history that has nothing to do with Beethoven and everything to do with the people around him.
The woman whose hair it contains—of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, connected in some unknown way to the Hiller circle of musicians and collectors—was a real person. She lived in a specific place and time. She had a life that the lock does not document and that the historical record does not appear to have preserved in any form that has been connected to this hair sample. She may have been well-known in the musical world of 1820s Vienna or she may have been completely private. She may have died before or after Beethoven. Everything about her is unknown except the fact of her ancestry and the fact that a lock of her hair ended up labeled with a famous composer’s name.