The mystery of Beethoven’s skull remains unsolved

Good morning. It’s Monday. We will come back to the day when I saw what was presented as a fragment of the skull of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

There it was, suspended in a contraption that took up much of the floor space of a small, windowless room: a fragment of Ludwig van Beethoven’s skull.

The medical researcher who pointed a beam at him said that’s what it was. So did the Beethoven specialist who had brought it to New York from his base in California. The idea was to test him for lead, to confirm or debunk the lingering theory that lead poisoning had killed Beethoven.

The researcher, Dr. Andrew Todd of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, tracked the readings that appeared on his computer screen that morning in 2010. Dr. Todd said days later that his tests with X-ray fluorescence no longer revealed lead. in this skull than in the skull of an average person. “Beethoven had no long-term exposure to lead,” he said, “so I think we can stop seeing lead as a major factor in his life.”

I thought of Dr. Todd’s work last week when I read that the scientists who had analyzed the DNA from Beethoven’s hair had come to the same conclusion.

This might have been their least surprising finding. They also said that a famous lock of hair, one that featured in a bestselling book and documentary in the early 2000s, could not have come from Beethoven. It belonged to a woman, possibly the daughter-in-law of a disciple of Beethoven who cut off a lock of the composer’s hair as he lay dying.

Another unexpected finding: a family in Belgium named van Beethoven has no genetic connection to the man who wrote the “Moonlight” Sonata.

I was wondering if the skull fragment had come up in that search, so I called Dr. Todd. He sounded crestfallen as he described a communication he received a few years after I saw him work. It came from Beethoven specialist William Meredith, who transported the skull fragment to Mount Sinai in 2010.

Meredith “let me know that there were doubts about the provenance of the skull fragment I measured,” Dr Todd said. “Then he said there was new information, and it might not be Beethoven’s skull.”

Dr Todd said the revelation had been frustrating. “The manuscript that I had written three-quarters ‘for a medical journal’ was put away with a snarl,” he said. “If it’s not Beethoven’s skull fragment, there isn’t much to say.”

What had happened to cast such doubt?

“Alas, the bone fragments – according to world expert osteologists in California – had been misdescribed” in the 1980s by two Austrian researchers, Meredith told me last week. One fragment I remember seeing with Dr. Todd apparently came from someone else’s skull, not Beethoven. (Osteologists are skeletal and bone specialists.)

The day after Beethoven died in 1827, a doctor sawed off his skull during an autopsy. When Beethoven’s body was exhumed for reburial 36 years later, the official report noted that the pieces of the skull did not fit together as many shards had been lost.

Yet Gerhard von Breuning, who had known Beethoven, took the skull pieces home from the exhumation and lent them to a respected physician, Romeo Seligmann. Meredith said Seligmann returned the fragments and they were sealed in the coffin when he was reinterred.

Seligmann “was known as a collector of skulls,” Meredith said, and some Beethoven scholars believe he then put other fragments in the pear-shaped metal box he had used for Beethoven – apparently without change the label. And apparently among them was the fragment that Dr. Todd had tested in 2010 while I was watching.

Seligmann, who died in 1892, never mentioned having the skull fragments. The first time they were mentioned was in 1944, when his son, the painter Adalbert Seligmann, wrote a will stating that they were in the pear-shaped metal box. Adalbert Seligmann also stated that there was a document from an anatomy professor attesting to their authenticity. Meredith told me the papers were lost.

The fragments were eventually inherited by a great-grandnephew of Romeo Seligmann, who allowed Meredith, who was the founding director of San José State University’s Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, to get tested.

And tested again. And even.

That’s how the fragment I remember from Dr. Todd’s research was examined by bone scientists in California in 2012, who found that Viennese pathologists in the 1980s had misidentified it. It was not from the front of the skull, as the Viennese pathologists said, but from the top. And because it showed no signs of having been cut, as the frontal bone had been in the 1827 autopsy, it ‘cannot be by Beethoven’, wrote one of the California experts. .

The obvious question is, which skull did Dr. Todd analyze?

It was apparently not that of Franz Schubert, who had been buried in the same cemetery as Beethoven and whose body was also exhumed when Beethoven’s was. Schubert’s bones were “brownish-black in color” and noticeably darker than Beethoven’s, according to an 1863 account.

Meredith said the answer could come with even more testing. “Now that the genome is known from the five hair strands, the bone samples could be tested again and the DNA could be compared,” he said. “For me, it’s a pleasant, clear and scientific way of science.”

Time

Expect rain, with temperatures nearing the mid-50s. Rain will persist throughout the evening, with temperatures dropping around 30 degrees.

ALTERNATE SIDE PARKING

Valid until April 6 (Easter).

The latest news from New York

Dear Diary:

Shortly after graduating from high school, I moved to Manhattan to audition for Broadway shows. I had taken dance lessons in my hometown of Philadelphia and was a member of a dancing ensemble on a local television show.

A friend from high school and the TV show who had already moved to Manhattan invited me to be his roommate in a basement apartment on 86th Street and Central Park West. A few days after my arrival, I was hired as a waiter at a restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Three weeks later, my friend and I attended an audition for “Flower Drum Song” by Rodgers and Hammerstein. There were 250 other dancers there. We learned and rehearsed the choreography for an entire day, with dancers being phased out as we went on.

Finally, six dancers remained on stage. Each of us was assigned a number.

“If I call your number, please leave the stage,” the stage manager said. “Thank you for your efforts.”

After calling the last number, my friend and I realized we were the only two dancers left.

“Would you two boys come down to my office,” said the stage manager.

Once we got him, he received further instructions: “Please come to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s office in the morning to sign your contract,” he said.

My friend and I were amazed and hugged each other.

“Do you two boys know each other?” asked the manager.

Ny

Not all news on the site expresses the point of view of the site, but we transmit this news automatically and translate it through programmatic technology on the site and not from a human editor.

goadnews

Victoriafox