Death of Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven, a German composer, died in his apartment in the Schwarzspanierhaus, Vienna, on 26 March 1827 at the age of 56, following a prolonged illness.

His death was witnessed by his sister-in-law, possibly by his secretary Karl Holz, and by his close friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who provided a vivid description of the event.

[1][2] Beethoven suffered declining health throughout the last years of his life, including the so-called "Late period" when he produced some of his most admired work.

[4] One common belief was that his last words were "Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est" ("Applaud, friends, the comedy is over"), the typical conclusion to performances of Italian Commedia dell'arte; this was specifically denied by Hüttenbrenner in 1860.

Since any imputations as to the dying man's emotional state are impossible to verify, they tend to be glossed over or ignored as irrelevant by modern Beethoven scholars.

Hepatitis B and C are causes of cirrhosis, but they spread from contact with contaminated body fluids and were extremely rare in Beethoven's day [citation needed].

Hepatitis A on the other hand can be contracted from food and water that were not handled properly and was very common in the 19th century, although it does not cause liver cirrhosis or permanent organ damage.

This was possibly a result of draining fluid from his abdomen in his last days, a practice that frequently caused infection and often death of the patient in a time before antibiotics and bacterial pathology were known.

In the days immediately preceding and following his death, a number of people, including Anton Schindler and Ferdinand Hiller, cut locks of hair from Beethoven's head.

[13] At a memorial mass in a Vienna church on 3 April, Mozart's Requiem was sung with an additional Libera me by Ignaz von Seyfried.

[9] In 1863 Beethoven's body (and also that of Schubert, who was buried nearby) was exhumed, studied and reburied, in proceedings paid for by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.

[16] At that time, fragments from the back of his skull, which had been separated during the autopsy, were acquired by the Austrian doctor Romeo Seligmann, which are also now in the Center for Beethoven Studies.

[17] There is dispute about the cause of Beethoven's death; alcoholic cirrhosis, syphilis, infectious hepatitis, lead poisoning, sarcoidosis, and Whipple's disease have all been proposed.

[18] In 2008, Austrian pathologist Christian Reiter asserted that Beethoven's doctor, Andreas Ignaz Wawruch [de], accidentally killed him by giving him an overdose of a lead-based cure.

Furthermore, human hair is a very bad biomarker for lead contamination, and Reiter's hypothesis must be considered dubious as long as proper scholarly documentation remains unpublished.

[21] In 2012, these skull fragments were analyzed independently by a panel of five forensic anthropologists, including Dr. Tim White, Dr. Alison Galloway, Dr. Mark Griffin, Dr. P. Willey and Dr. Eric Bartelink.

Chronic low-level lead exposure causes a slowly progressive hearing loss with sensory and autonomic findings, rather than the classic wrist drop due to motor neuropathy from sub-acute poisoning.

The authors concluded that, had Beethoven’s alcohol consumption been sufficiently heavy over a long enough period of time, its interaction with his heritable risk factors may constitute a plausible causal explanation for his liver disease.