The Journey of Beethoven’s Hair

Ludwig van Beethoven died on Monday, March 26, 1827. The day after his death, a fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Ferdinand Hiller stood distraught next to his teacher, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, gazing at the lifeless face of his hero. With a pair of scissors he cut off a lock of Beethoven’s greying hair and placed it carefully in a white handkerchief.

And therein begins the story of Beethoven’s hair, journeying through the nineteenth century and eluding the Nazi turmoil of the twentieth century, so beautifully researched and written by Russell Martin in his book Beethoven’s Hair. Today, the relic rests at the Beethoven Center in San Jose, California. Purchased at an auction at Sotheby’s by Ira F. Brilliant, a retired Phoenix real estate developer and Dr Alfredo Guevara, a urological surgeon from Nogales, the hair was donated to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University.

A few strands, kept by Guevara for research purposes, revealed high levels of lead in Beethoven’s hair. In fact, Beethoven, throughout his life suffered from plumbism (lead poisoning) which was probably responsible for his deafness and his sufferings to the day he died at fifty-six.

Beethoven, who stood for the freedom of mankind and expressed his ideals so well in his “Ode to Joy” and his opera Fidelio, became a Nazi pin-up boy during Hitler’s regime. It seems, however, that a part of the once living Beethoven, his hair, defied Nazification and escaped Germany in the possession of a person fleeing persecution, to end up in Gelleleje, a small fishing port in Denmark.

The mystery of Beethoven’s hair’s escape from Nazi Germany is the subject of this story. We must follow Ferdinand Hiller through his eventful life as composer and conductor and the lives of his descendants.

In 1828 the seventeen-year-old Hiller left his affluent parents’ home in Frankfurt to study music in Paris. Sometime before he left home, Ferdinand had Beethoven’s hair mounted in a small wooden frame, the kind of locket in which miniature portraits were commonly displayed. He shared his love of Beethoven with fellow musicians such as Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt and the poet Heine. He was very proud of his Beethoven hair; his close friends, who worshipped Beethoven, considered the hair a religious icon. In 1831 Hiller, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn formed a showy foursome, performing the works of Beethoven in Paris at every opportunity.

The hair travelled with Ferdinand throughout Europe until he settled down in Dresden in 1844. By then he had married the singer Antolka Hoge, nicknamed “La Bella Polacca” because of her great beauty. She was a Catholic, and Hiller was a non-practising Jew. In 1845, when the great Beethoven monument was consecrated in Vienna, Hiller grew worried about his friend Liszt’s outbursts against Jews. Liszt, in his book on Hungarian gypsies and their music, attacked Jews as non-humans who “lacked any creative abilities” and recommended “that they leave cultural Europe en masse and relocate to Palestine”.

Likewise, Wagner re-issued his 1850 book Jewry in Music in 1869 in which he spoke of the “pernicious Jewish influence on German culture”. “Jews”, he declared, “were interested in art in order to sell it … they worked to convert the lofty realm of artistic creation into a mere marketplace”.

Ferdinand Hiller’s last musical appointment was in Cologne, where he enjoyed a rich musical life. He established monthly concerts, bringing to Cologne Europe’s finest composers and musicians. He wrote to a friend: “My greatest joy, my greatest source of pride is to be able to conduct so many marvellous performances of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.”

Ferdinand Hiller died on May 11, 1883, in the arms of his son, Paul. He was buried in the Lutheran cemetery and no allusion was made to his Jewish faith. In many of his letters to his pupil Max Bruch, Hiller wrote of his fears of the rising anti-Semitism which was sweeping through Germany and causing many non-practising Jews to convert to Christianity.

Hiller gave the locket of Beethoven’s hair to Paul as a birthday present on May 1, 1883. It seemed more fitting to pass this treasure to his son rather than to his daughter, Toni, three years Paul’s senior. Born in 1853 during his parents’ Parisian holiday, Paul was a singer, a baritone in the city opera of Chemnitz, near Dresden. He had a son, Felix Ferdinand, who was born in Chemnitz in 1882 when Paul Hiller was not married. In 1902 he returned to Cologne and married Sophie Lion who, like Paul, was a singer and Jewish. They had two sons, Edgar Ferdinand, born in May 1906, and Erwin Ottmar, born in April 1908.

In Cologne, Paul Hiller was appointed music critic of the Rheinische Zeitung, a position he held for twenty-four years. In December 1911 he took the locket to a well-known art dealer, Hermann Grosshenning, who mounted the hair in a new locket. He verified his work beneath the outer backing: “Newly pasted to make it dust-free. Original condition improved. Dated Cologne 18/12/1911”. Paul Hiller added his own inscription on the brown paper which is visible on the locket’s underside: “This hair was cut off Beethoven’s corpse by my father, Dr Ferdinand Hiller, on the day after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, that is on 27 March 1827.”

Paul Hiller died at the age of eighty-one in January 1934. To understand the plight of German Jews one only needs to look at Paul’s obituary with its thick black cross and the assertion that “he died firmly believing in his Saviour”. The announcement of his death appeared in the Westdeutscher Beobachter, a zealously pro-Nazi newspaper in Cologne. No announcement appeared in the Rheinische Zeitung. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, in an effort to save his family from persecution. He was survived by his wife, Sophie, his twenty-eight-year-old son Edgar (an opera singer as were his mother and grandmother before him), Erwin (twenty-six, an actor) and their half-brother Felix (fifty-one, residing in Berlin, a composer like his grandfather).

Paul’s two sons resided with their mother, but by 1936 there were no Hillers living in Cologne. Life for German Jews had become untenable. Jewish writers, artists and musicians fled to America and England and as many as 1500 fled to Denmark. Paul’s sons, together with their mother, disappeared as completely as if they had never existed.

Where in this turmoil was the locket with Beethoven’s hair so expertly ensconced in its now dustproof, elegant container? Even though he was an old man, Paul Hiller had died unexpectedly. Did he give the locket to his illegitimate son, Felix, who lived in faraway Berlin, or to one of his two legitimate sons?

We know with certainty that Beethoven’s hair reappeared in the little port of Gilleleje on the north coast of the Danish island of Sjaelland in October 1943.

Beethoven’s hair and its travelling companion came to Denmark to seek refuge from Nazi persecution. Denmark had no “Jewish problem”. Jewish citizens were considered to be equal Danish citizens, protected by the people of Denmark and its king. Even under German occupation Danish Jews and Christians alike continued to live relatively free lives.

This all changed on the morning of September 30, 1943, when Rabbi Marcus Melchior advised his flock that on the following day the Germans would begin the deportation of Danish Jews to concentration camps. “By tonight, we must all be in hiding,” were his final words.

Danish people took the young and the old, children and the infirm in trains, cars and buses to various ports. From there Danish fishermen took the frightened people to the safety of neutral Sweden. One such port was Gilleleje. Within five days, 1300 Jews were transported safely to Sweden in small fishing boats by the fishermen of Gilleleje.

The doctor in Gilleleje was Kay Fremming. It is not known how many refugees were hidden in Dr Fremming’s home or on the floor above his surgery while waiting to be shipped to Sweden. His wife Marta co-operated with the Red Cross and helped the refugees find hiding places in the homes of the people of Gilleleje. It is also not known who brought Beethoven’s hair to Gilleleje and how Dr Fremming acquired the precious icon. Was it a gift from a sick man or woman who needed a doctor’s attention? Or was the locket left with Dr Fremming for safe-keeping, never to be reclaimed?

On the night of October 6, 120 people sat crowded in the loft of the Gilleleje church, awaiting their chance to escape to Sweden. It was a dark night and one survivor remembers the silence except for the half-hourly pealing of the church bells. Dr Fremming was tending to the sick and to the children who had been drugged to stop them from crying, when the Germans stormed the church and took the frightened people away. With a few exceptions, all died in concentration camps.

When the war ended, no one came to Gilleleje to claim Beethoven’s hair. Dr Fremming, a quiet, private man, never discussed the precious gift given him by a stranger. He and Marta adopted a little French girl, Michele, who had spent the war years with them in Gilleleje. Dr Fremming died in September 1969 at the age of sixty-four. Michele first heard of the hair a few days after her father’s death when she and her mother found the black locket in Dr Fremming’s desk drawer. It was then that Marta Fremming told her daughter about the events of October 6, 1943.

In 1970 Marta gave the locket to her daughter, for whom it was a precious memory of her father and his insistence on family music-making. She hung the black locket in her study and it was not until financial difficulties forced her to sell the locket that the widowed Michele Wassard Larsen and her son Thomas arrived at Sotheby’s Copenhagen office on May 26, 1994, to sign a contract allowing the London office to offer Beethoven’s hair for sale. At the auction on December 1, 1994, the locket was sold for £3600 to unnamed American purchasers.

Ira Brilliant remembered to the end of his life his trembling hands when he first held the parcel containing Beethoven’s hair. An avid collector of Beethoven’s works and letters, he immediately advised Dr Alfredo Guevara that their new precious possession had arrived. The locket was ceremonially opened by Dr Guevara, dressed in his surgical garments, in the operating theatre of the Arizona Medical Center. In the presence of a forensic anthropologist and a television crew from London, those present stood in awe as Beethoven’s greying hair was loosened from its home of many years. Some strands were taken by Dr Guevara for testing purposes and the rest of the hair went to the Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies where it rests today.

While Dr Guevara was busy organising the scientific examination of Beethoven’s hair and its DNA comparison with small fragments of Beethoven’s bones, Ira Brilliant decided to find out its provenance. Having been told by Michele Larsen the story of its acquisition by her father, Ira Brilliant, himself a Jew, decided to find the person who had escaped to Denmark with Beethoven’s hair.

There was little information to be gleaned from people in Gilleleje, nor was Rabbi Melchior able to help. Christian Tortzen’s book about the events of October 6, 1943, and the Danish playwright Finn Abrahamowitz’s play based on Tortzen’s book, could offer no answer as to who had brought the hair to Denmark. Thomas and Michele Larsen were brought in to the search for the elusive person. Along with Brilliant they experienced years of frustration.

The archivist at Yad Vashem in Israel reported that neither Sophie Hiller nor her sons Edgar and Erwin had died in the concentration camps. And there was no sign of either Sophie or her sons having taken refuge in Denmark.

Oxana Korol of the Red Cross Tracing Service found that a German Jew named Erwin Hiller, born in 1908, had sailed from Bremenhaven to New York on June 16, 1948. But he did not disembark in New York; he simply vanished. It was not until Alexander Fulling, in a town near Cologne, joined the international search for the carrier of Beethoven’s hair to Denmark, that the fate of Edgar Hiller was discovered. Edgar had spent the war years in Switzerland. He returned to Hamburg and committed suicide in 1959. His small estate was willed to his brother, Marcel Hillaire of Los Angeles, California. Marcel Hillaire (for that was the name Erwin Hiller had adopted) was an actor who appeared in many films, notably as the chef in Sabrina where he delighted cinema audiences teaching Audrey Hepburn how “to crack an egg”. Although he had died by the time Ira Brilliant found out about him, his close friend Esther Taylor remembered Marcel mentioning Beethoven’s hair and how it would have helped him financially, had his father Paul given the locket to him. Marcel thought his father had donated the locket to either a music school or a museum in Cologne.

Marcel Hillaire had used a different name during the war when he worked as a clerk in the German army in France. He tried to bring his mother to France but Sophie Hiller died of a heart attack at the station as she was boarding the train for Paris. Marcel ended up in jail in Berlin when it was discovered that he was a Jew. He was awaiting execution when the city was liberated by the Russians.

Search for any documentation of a gift of the locket to a music school or museum proved fruitless. Who then brought the locket with Beethoven’s hair to Denmark? Did Paul Hiller donate the locket to an institution and a Jewish employee take it to keep it out of Nazi hands when he escaped to Denmark? Did this Beethoven lover entrust the locket to Dr Fremming but die in a concentration camp after the raid of October 6, 1943? Perhaps he died in Sweden, perhaps he gifted the locket to a kind doctor who took care of him in his hour of need. Whoever he was, he never returned to claim his treasure. How Beethoven’s hair got to Gilleleje is likely to remain forever a wartime mystery.