Beethoven, the never imaginary patient

'Beethoven on his deathbed', March 29, 1827. Lithograph by Josef Danhauser after his own drawing.Beethoven-Haus Bonn

In the great exhibition inaugurated at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in December 2019 as a prelude to the great celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth (later severely diminished by the pandemic), one of its sections delved into the composer's illnesses, putting a special Emphasis, of course, on his premature deafness, which allowed the visitor to observe —almost with fear— the various gadgets —big and small— that he inserted into his ears, as well as learn about the —unsuccessful— therapies used to alleviate their effects.

An adjacent panel graphically summarized the most important illnesses of a composer almost permanently beset by all kinds of more or less serious ailments: a possible smallpox in childhood, typhus, chronic headaches, pneumonia and other respiratory infections,

rheumatic fever, jaundice, gout, rheumatism, ascites, multiple recurrent abdominal complaints, and cirrhosis.

To the list is now added with scientific certainty, thanks to the results of the sequencing of its genome that have just been made public, hepatitis B.

A letter to Franz Wegeler, a doctor who was part of his circle of close friends in Bonn, dated June 29, 1801, when the composer was only 30 years old, is revealing of his constant pathologies and is also the first written document from his hand in which he openly refers to his deafness, the "great secret" that he tried to hide by all means so as not to damage his prestige: "But that envious demon [of his professional successes], my bad health, has ruined me plans: my hearing has been getting weaker and weaker for the last three years, and that must have been caused by my abdomen, which, as you know, was already in a miserable state then [in Bonn], but here [in Vienna] has been made worse by seeing me constantly afflicted with diarrhea and feeling extraordinarily weak because of it.”

One year later,

the suffering and despair caused by his deafness made him seriously consider the idea of ​​suicide, and this is glimpsed in what is known as the Heiligenstadt will, addressed to his brothers Carl and Johann, to whom he asked if, after his death, Dr. Johann Schmidt, whose patient he was between 1802 and 1807, was alive, he had to describe his illness so that "at least the world can be reconciled to me after my death."

Paradoxically, music, which he perceived with increasing difficulty and less clear outlines, became his lifeline: from this deep vital crisis was born, for example, the Third Symphony, in which that weakness of months ago changed into heroism and in an apparently irrepressible push.

and this is glimpsed in what is known as the Heiligenstadt will, addressed to his brothers Carl and Johann, to whom he asked that if, after his death, Dr. Johann Schmidt, of whom he was a patient between 1802 and 1807, was alive, he would have to describe his illness so that "at least the world can be reconciled to me after my death."

Paradoxically, music, which he perceived with increasing difficulty and less clear outlines, became his lifeline: from this deep vital crisis was born, for example, the Third Symphony, in which that weakness of months ago changed into heroism and in an apparently irrepressible push.

and this is glimpsed in what is known as the Heiligenstadt will, addressed to his brothers Carl and Johann, to whom he asked that if, after his death, Dr. Johann Schmidt, of whom he was a patient between 1802 and 1807, was alive, he would have to describe his illness so that "at least the world can be reconciled to me after my death."

Paradoxically, music, which he perceived with increasing difficulty and less clear outlines, became his lifeline: from this deep vital crisis was born, for example, the Third Symphony, in which that weakness of months ago changed into heroism and in an apparently irrepressible push.

he was to describe his illness so that "at least the world can be reconciled to me after my death."

Paradoxically, music, which he perceived with increasing difficulty and less clear outlines, became his lifeline: from this deep vital crisis was born, for example, the Third Symphony, in which that weakness of months ago changed into heroism and in an apparently irrepressible push.

he was to describe his illness so that "at least the world can be reconciled to me after my death."

Paradoxically, music, which he perceived with increasing difficulty and less clear outlines, became his lifeline: from this deep vital crisis was born, for example, the Third Symphony, in which that weakness of months ago changed into heroism and in an apparently irrepressible push.

More information

DNA from Beethoven's hair suggests liver problems as cause of death

The passing of the years did not attenuate his suffering: "I am almost always ill", the composer wrote to his friend Nikolaus Zmeskall on February 25, 1813, in a letter signed "Ludwig van Beethoven

”.

And in one of his conversation notebooks, in April 1823, he had written: "a tragic misfortune, doctors know little and one ends up getting tired, especially if he always has to take care of himself."

In the intermittent diary that he kept between 1812 and 1818, in which the everyday and the transcendent coexist equally, a note of an indeterminate date simply says: "Take the pills again on Saturday or Sunday."

He was not an easy patient, of course, and everything points to the fact that the doctors did little to alleviate his ailments: in the aforementioned letter to Wegeler from 1801, he also recounted how a certain Dr. Frank had recommended almond oil for his deafness, when while describing another doctor who had prescribed cold baths as a "doctor's ass".

The disease also found its way into Beethoven's own music, sometimes with humor and other times, again, with transcendence.

The two best examples of the first are found, as usual, in his canons, small imitative pastimes based on texts full of puns with which the composer liked to regale his friends.

To one of his doctors, Anton Braunhofer, who had imposed a severe diet to cure a very serious gastrointestinal problem, he sent a letter on May 13, 1825 in which he invents a dialogue between a doctor and his patient .

And at the end he adds a canon for four voices (WoO 189) with the following text: “The doctor locks the door to death;

music [

] also relieves grief [

]”.

On June 4, after failing to find his doctor at his house, Beethoven wrote a simple enigmatic canon for two voices (WoO 190) of just seven bars in which he sings uniquely and laconically: "I was here, Doctor, I was here."

Manuscript of the beginning of the slow movement of the Quartet op.

132 by Beethoven, in which the composer refers to himself in the heading as a "convalescent".Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

But it was also precisely during these days that he began to compose the slow movement of his

, at the beginning of which he noted a long heading: “Sacred song of thanks from a convalescent to the divinity in the Lydian mode”.

Here there is no joke, nor irony, nor lightness, but one of the most profound, confessional and, in a certain sense, autobiographical music that Beethoven composed after recovering from one of his most painful illnesses: the one that seemed, after so many previous announcements, the definitive.

“Sentiendo nueva fuerza” and “Con intísimo sentimiento” are two indications that appear later in the handwritten score of another work that proclaims, once again, and more explicitly than ever, the saving power of music.

Furthermore, exceptionally, as he had already done in the last movement of the

, Beethoven makes these very personal notations in German, not in the usual Italian (like the

oppressed”, from the Cavatina of the

or the

“with devotion”, from the

).

The music clearly oscillates between movement and stillness, between being and nothing.

The sections written in the form of a choir seem to transport us to the world of Renaissance polyphony, while those in which the musician recovers his physical and creative strength are indebted only to the unique style of the late Beethoven.

The Lydian F major (with B natural) of some sounds subdued and translucent compared to the luminous and transparent D major of others.

Life and death, health and illness, go hand in hand with no bar lines to separate or distinguish them.

The sequencing of the composer's genome has not only revealed a genetic predisposition to liver pathologies (most likely aggravated by excessive alcohol consumption), but also completely rules out, as the German genealogist Theo Molberg had already done through registry documents. , the Spanish origin of the composer's paternal grandmother, a hoax echoed very recently by the polemicist Norman Lebrecht in his book

.

In the map that includes the article published this week by

and which shows in different colors the probable locations of Beethoven's autosomal ancestors, the profiles of Spain —including the “Moorish” and “Southern” that Lebrecht continues to spread as the possible birthplace of Beethoven's grandmother to explain the supposed dark complexion of the composer— delimit a space, of course, of an immaculate white.

Stumpff's lock, from which Beethoven's entire genome has been sequenced, with an inscription from its former owner Patrick Stirling.Kevin Brown (BEETHOVEN-HAUS BONN)

What the study also confirms are certain recurring illnesses of the composer, something that the doctor Franz Wegeler already made clear in the appendix to his

in 1845: "The origin of his ills, his hearing problems and dropsy who finally ended his life were already in the sick hypogastrium of my friend in 1796″.

But personal opinions, speculation and those blind strokes from the string of doctors who tried, almost always unsuccessfully, to alleviate his physical hardships have now given way to the certainties of science.

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