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by Russell Martin (Bloomsbury, £14.99, UK edition)
And if someone had told him that forensic analysis of the strands of hair would one day allow scientists to determine crucial facts about Beethoven's notorious ill-health - and its most conspicuous manifestation, his deafness - he would no doubt have laughed in disbelief. Yet it's all true. Fact stranger than fiction. No wonder the American author Russell Martin was attracted to the story. Biographical details of him are sparse - just three lines on the inside flap at the back of the book. He is primarily a non-fiction writer - no surprise there. But what other credentials does he have to write this book? Is he a musician, or long-standing music lover? I suspect neither, since at one point in the book he describes how Ira Brilliant - who bought the lock of hair at that auction - encourages him to listen to Beethoven's music to understand its power. It doesn't matter. He knows how to tell a good story. I suspect from his prose style he is also a journalist, or was once. (It takes one to know one.) I winced at journalese like, "..... his friend Bonn Elector Maximilian Franz", "..... Hiller had made the snow-slowed journey", "..... when he described his by-then-deceased colleague," "..... composer and music critic Robert Schumann". And while I'm on the subject of style, can anyone tell me if there's an American rule of grammar that forbids the separation of a verb from its auxiliary in the past tense? Martin resolutely refuses to do so, leading to sentences like, "..... the dying man still had seemed very much alive," "..... French forces already had reached the Rhine," "..... a joie de vivre that always had been missing," ".....Hiller quickly was captivated by him," "the true pleasures of his work always had escaped him," "..... as he long had hoped he would". I could go on and on. It's ugly and stilted English and it made me angry every time I came across it, which means on almost every page. But but but, I hear you say, you're behaving like a journalist, something you've just berated him for; stop nit-picking and concentrate on the story. Fair point. Martin has decided to tell the story chronologically, interspersing it with chapters on Beethoven's life. These chapters are short - very short - and read rather peremptorily, as if he is transferring his research material almost directly on to the page and is reluctant to hold up the main tale - that of the lock of hair. The burning issue of the identity of the Eternally Beloved, for instance, is dealt with in a single sentence. He races through Beethoven's life in fifty-three pages, and it deserves more than that. Martin is strongest, obviously, on the extraordinary story of the Jews of Denmark and the Nazis; a story of individual heroism - and a traitor in the midst. This, the longest section of the book, is a real page-turner. And what is its connection with the lock of hair? Somehow it came into the possession of a local doctor who was involved in getting Jews out of Denmark to the safety of neutral Sweden. How did if come to be in his possession? The truth is, no one knows. The likely explanation is that the grandson of Ferdinand Hiller - the family was Jewish and had changed its name from Hildesheim -- fled to Denmark to escape from the Nazis, and then gave the lock to the doctor in gratitude for getting him out. All the main protagonists are dead, and the doctor never told anyone how he came to be in possession of the lock, not even, apparently, his wife. Martin builds a fascinating story out of what is merely conjecture. But then he has to - without it there would be no book. The most important part of the book is the results of the DNA tests, and other important scientific tests, on the precious strands of hair. Without the story that precedes them, they would have made, at best, an article in a scientific journal - but no less significant for that. It is these results which made news around the world. And yet...and yet...is it really true to say, as the book's cover does, that the result is "a musical mystery solved"? I don't think so. The single major revelation of the tests is the enormously high level of lead concentration in Beethoven's body. In fact he had forty two times the level of lead than in the control samples also tested. But what this doesn't prove - because it cannot - is that the level of lead concentration in Beethoven's body was forty two times higher than in other people who lived at the same time as him - when lead was present in pots, pans, water pipes and so on. It certainly contributed to his ill health, but to attribute his deafness to it is going too far. Why weren't there other famous deaf musicians, or deaf statesmen, or deaf anybodies? Ultimately the book rules out more than it proves. We now know for sure that Beethoven did not take morphine in his final illness. But why? Because his doctors were too inefficient, or because he refused to take it? We don't know. We know there was no mercury in his body, therefore he did not have syphilis. And I cannot avoid the impression that the book has a "sponsored" feel to it. The same names at the Beethoven Research Centre - endowed by Ira Brilliant - at San José State University come up in list form just a little too often. The give-away is the final sentence of the book recommending membership of the American Beethoven Society at SJSU. There are signs the book was hurriedly completed to meet a deadline, allowing trivial copyediting errors to creep through: a word dropped, p9; an extraneous word, p74; a misspelt German word, p109. There are some factual errors too. Denmark is not sea-encircled; the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony are a musical motif, not motive; Johanna van Beethoven was not imprisoned for embezzlement but put under house arrest; it wasn't Fidelio but Leonore that was premiered in 1805; the fanfare in the Ninth Symphony does not conclude the Fourth Movement, it ushers in the voices; and the fifth Late Quartet was not Beethoven's last complete composition - that was the replacement final movement for Opus 130. And please, Mr Martin, there is no such word as "storied". If there were, it would not mean -- as you use it - full of stories (the most storied month, the storied lock of hair), but a building with many floors. Yes, yes, yes, I'm being a nit-picking journalist again. The book really is a cracking good read. Russell Martin has absorbed an enormous amount of research from, I suspect, a standing start, and he tells the remarkable story in a lucid and compulsive way.
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© John Suchet |
When fifteen-year-old Ferdinand Hiller - music student and aspiring
composer - snipped a lock of hair from Beethoven's body, he cannot have
imagined that it would resurface at public auction more than a century
and a half later. Even less so that, after passing through several pairs
of hands, it would play an unwitting part in the escape of Jews in
Denmark from the Nazis.
