Housed in a dark-wood oval frame a bit more than ten centimeters long, the coil of fine brown and gray hair was sealed between two pieces of glass, one of which was convex. On the brittle paper that was sealed to the flat back of the frame, someone named Paul Hiller long ago had written the following words in German, then added his signature beneath them: This hair was cut off Beethoven's corpse by my father, Dr. Ferdinand v. Hiller on the day after Ludwig van Beethoven's death, that is, on 27 March 1827, and was given to me as a birthday present in Cologne on May 1, 1883. While Ira Brilliant and the others watched with fascination, Dr. Guevara and conservator Nancy Odegaard-both dressed in green surgical scrubs and wearing masks and gloves-worked at a sterile table, measuring with calipers the glass and the frame that surrounded it, calling out a series of numbers as well as their impressions of the locket's condition before Guevara wielded a scalpel and prepared to go inside. This was surgery of a sort, and the doctor proceeded with careful confidence, describing each cut and every observation with the kind of commentary he might have made if the subject at hand had been a human gut and the gathered observers were surgical interns still prone to getting queasy. "Now I'm slicing through the last of the glue that holds the paper backing," he announced, his voice bearing more than a hint of his preoccupation.

"I'll pull the backing away now, and...let's see, below...here's another layer of paper, with writing on it, and...the writing's in French, I believe. Can someone verify that this is in French and translate it for us?" A video camera designed for recording the intricacies and complexities of rather more conventional surgeries looked down from overhead and the rest of the group watched the doctor's work on television monitors placed around the room, and yes, that was French, someone offered. The text was set in type, but was difficult to make sense of, and the room's quick consensus was that the paper was simply newspaper scrap that had been used for backing. Yet the words written on the next layer Guevara exposed were both decipherable and surprising. Handwritten this time, and again in German, they explained that the locket was "newly pasted" by a picture framer in Cologne in 1911, the resealing done at a time when Paul Hiller would have been fifty-eight years old, and presumably about the time when he wrote his explanatory note on the outer paper. At last the surgeon held nothing more than the conjoined pieces of glass in his gloved hands, and Odegaard helped steady the glass on edge as Guevara began to break the seal with a scalpel. "Wow, could you hear that?" he asked. "I heard a rush of air like a vacuum when I started to separate the glass." Two minutes passed as the surgeon's knife slowly circumnavigated the oval, then finally the pieces were free and Guevara delicately lifted the domed glass away from its mate, and although no one spoke for a moment, you could sense the massed excitement.

Exposed for the first time in at least eight decades, perhaps many more, there was Beethoven's hair-darker than it appeared under glass, a carefully shaped coil containing a hundred or two hundred strands, one of the group guessed. When he had been helped with the straps that held his mask over his nose, Guevara bent to the table to smell the hair. It was odorless, he declared, then Ira Brilliant and the others pressed forward to get close to the remarkable relic themselves. Before the morning ended and the team adjourned for something of a celebratory lunch, Beethoven's hair was photographed, weighed, and examined under a high-power microscope. Forensic anthropologist Walter Birkby declared that on quick inspection the condition of the hair appeared consistent with hair that was approximately two hundred years old; he noted that it appeared to be free of lice-or the carcasses of lice-and the group was delighted when he noted as well that follicles were attached to at least some of the strands. Fifteen-year-old Ferdinand Hiller must have pulled at the hair as he snipped it-that was the initial supposition-and the fact that the boy inadvertently pulled a few follicles from Beethoven's scalp meant DNA testing might indeed be feasible, a possibility that none of the group had dared count on till that moment. The cameras continued to roll at a press conference in the early afternoon, and the team outlined publicly for the first time the array of tests it planned to undertake. Prior to examining the hair's DNA-if that were done-likely there would be examinations to determine whether opiates had been in Beethoven's system at the time of his death.

Other analyses would search for trace metals in his hair: high levels of zinc might mean that his immune system had been severely compromised; the presence of mercury could indicate that he had been treated for an infection, and elevated levels of mercury might even go some distance toward explaining Beethoven's notoriously eccentric behavior; an abundance of lead would point to one potential cause of the composer's deafness, and even might explain the concert of other maladies that had plagued him throughout his adult life. Drawing on techniques and testing procedures that were established when a lock of Napoleon's hair was studied in the 1970s-tests that concluded that the emperor had not been poisoned, contrary to what many historians long had suspected-the Beethoven tests would be designed to destroy or permanently alter only a very minimal amount of the hair he had just unlocked, Guevara informed the assembled reporters. And the tests would be carried out only by highly qualified scientists: "We're going to prepare a protocol to do the work under strict conditions that are forensic, sterile, and modern. We plan to tabulate people who have FBI-quality expertise, then invite them to propose specific tests to us. But we won't sacrifice the bulk of the hair. The main thing is our hope that two hundred years from now people won't think that there were neophytes at work who couldn't get their act together.

Twenty-five or fifty years ago, this kind of testing wouldn't have been possible. And fifty years from now, maybe we'll get much more information." But the newspaper and television reporters wanted to know more: they needed some sense of what motivated Guevara and his partner to buy the hair and now begin the process of having it rigorously examined. What was it about Beethoven that so obsessed them? "My interest in Beethoven is like a fire burning inside me," answered seventy-three-year-old Ira Brilliant, his Brooklyn accent diluted only a bit by thirty years of expatriation in Arizona. "I started collecting his letters and first editions twenty years ago out of a deep wish to own something Beethoven himself had touched. It was my way of paying homage to his greatness." A short man whose dense eyebrows and deep-set eyes seemed to mirror the composer's, Ira Brilliant explained that on a November day almost a year earlier, he phoned Guevara, his friend and fellow Beethoven zealot, soon after he had seen the lock of hair listed in a Sotheby's catalog, and the two had agreed that they would try to make it theirs. "This was much more than simply something Beethoven had touched. The hair is Beethoven. It's a marvelous relic." And the doctor agreed, of course. A large man with a thick shock of black hair atop his head, his speech inflected with echoes of his native Spanish-and "Che" to his friends since his long-ago college days-Guevara's obsession with both Beethoven's music and Beethoven the man tumbled out of him with a kind of evangelical passion.

"Beethoven was deaf, as you know. He suffered from kidney stones, which is a very painful condition. He had hepatitis; he had multiple episodes of gastrointestinal infections. For someone to have that many maladies and to suffer so greatly and yet produce superhuman music, music that can actually elevate the spirit to a much different plane than the ordinary plane we live in, is quite phenomenal." Beethoven's hair-still in the same coil in which it was wrapped nearly two centuries ago, the hundreds of separate strands still waiting to be counted-had been removed for safekeeping, but Che Guevara spoke of it as though it remained in the room: "To get this close to a man who was able to do this...for me it's a personal triumph. Acquiring the hair already has changed my life." On a warm May afternoon a hundred and seventy years before, Beethoven's hair would have spread wildly out from his head and the dark eyes beneath it would have appeared small but piercingly bright as he made his daily walk through the city. His complexion was swarthy, his forehead broad and high, and much of his face had been pockmarked by smallpox back when he was a boy. He was short, even by the standards of his day, and because of intestinal troubles that by 1824 had plagued him for three decades, no longer was he the stout and stocky man he once had been.

He would have walked with a lumbering gait that spring, one that evidenced a curious kind of clumsiness, and he would not have heard the din of the grand and boisterous city in which he trod-not the constant racket of vendors' carts and carriages, nor the cacophonous noise of the jugglers, puppeteers, and street musicians who seemed to clog every corner; neither the kindly proffered greetings of acquaintances nor the taunts of the urchins who tagged at his heels. The deafness that twenty years before had begun to rob him of the subtlest kinds of sounds inexorably had reduced his world to animated and very isolated silence, and by now he could hear only what his mind imagined. Yet Ludwig van Beethoven, this strange and eccentric figure-who once had been arrested as a vagrant-was at that moment, in fact, the most celebrated composer in a city filled to its exquisite rooftops with composers. His Ninth Symphony had been premiered only days before to the most glorious kind of acclaim. He had become a true legend in Vienna in the three decades since he had made the city his home, and his bold, passionate, and altogether revolutionary compositions already seemed destined to endure. The people who would have greeted or simply recognized him as walked that afternoon would have understood that Herr Beethoven was aging quickly and clearly was not well. But at least his music, they would have warranted, would survive for centuries.

1770-1792 Ludwig van Beethoven had been his grandfather's name as well, and although he was not quite three when his grandfather died in 1773, the composer always imagined that his huge talents had come to him from his much revered namesake-himself the son of a baker in the Flemish city of Mechelen-who had become Kapellmeister, music director, of the Bonn court of Maximilian Friedrich in 1761. Beethoven's father, Johann, was for many years a tenor in the court choir; he taught singing and was a passably accomplished pianist and violinist as well, but at the time his father died in 1773, Johann's career was languishing and seemed unlikely to catch fire in the foreseeable future. His wife, born Maria Magdalena Keverich, the daughter of a cook at Maximilian Friedrich's summer palace at Ehrenbreitstein, already had been widowed when she married Johann in the autumn of 1767, a few days before her twenty-first birthday. A son by her first husband had died in infancy; so had her second child, Ludwig Maria, who died six days after his birth in 1769, the year before the third child, also named Ludwig, was born. Maria van Beethoven was intelligent, patient, kind, and, it appears, utterly unassuming, the young family's critical counterpoint to Johann, who grew increasingly bombastic, erratic, and undependable following his father's death and the denial of his application to succeed him as Kapellmeister, his behavior later exacerbated by a severe dependence on drink.

If Maria was her young son's ready support, Johann, according to the few accounts that exist, often was a terror to the boy, bullying him, beating him on occasion as well as, legends contend, dragging the weeping five-year-old from his bed to the piano late at night and drunkenly compelling him to practice. Yet his father's rages and overbearing demeanor somehow never soured the boy on music, and his remarkable talents quickly emerged despite them. Young Ludwig was only seven when he gave his first public performance on the piano; at eight, he began to receive piano, violin, and viola instruction from a series of noted court musicians, and by age eleven he had become deputy to court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, who had taken the boy under his tutelage a year before. Beethoven, whose academic education already had ended, occasionally played the organ at masses and court functions when Neefe had to be absent, and the tutor was far from reluctant to heap praise on his young protege. At Neefe's urging, the editors of the German Magazin der Musik posted a notice in March 1783 heralding Beethoven as a boy of "most promising talent. He plays the clavier very skillfully and with power [and] reads at sight very well...This young genius deserves a subsidy in order to enable him to travel.

He will surely become a second Mozart if he continues as well as he has begun." It remains unclear whether it was Neefe or someone else who arranged four years hence for Beethoven to visit Vienna, seat of the Hapsburg throne, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the locus also of Europe's cultured passion for music. Neefe-rather more in the mold of Beethoven's grandfather than his father-was kind, cultivated, and well-read, as well as being a multitalented musician, and he presumed that further training in Vienna, plus a more general sort of exposure to its rarefied musical climate, would transform the sixteen-year-old's prodigious talents into mature renown. Neefe even had hoped privately that the boy might secure an apprenticeship with Wolfgang Mozart, but it appears instead that the Austrian master-who would be dead in only four more years-heard the young man play on solely a single occasion. Mozart's initial reaction on an April afternoon to the selection the boy from Bonn had prepared for him was decidedly cool-surely there were dozens of young fellows in Vienna who could master a single showy piece. But when Beethoven begged to be given a theme on which he might improvise, Mozart acquiesced and soon was astonished by the teenager's range and inventiveness and the power with which he played. The young Beethoven still seemed beguiled by the music he was drawing out of the master's piano when Mozart finally walked out of the room and eagerly spoke to a group of courtiers whom he had kept waiting: "Keep your eyes on that one," he instructed. "Someday he will give the world plenty to talk about."

Beethoven might have met Mozart again; he might even have studied with him for a time, but his sojourn in Vienna was abruptly cut short by news from Bonn that his mother was gravely ill. He was able to reach her bedside before she succumbed to tuberculosis, but her death was a terrible blow to the whole family. Beethoven's infant sister, Maria Margaretha, died a few months later; two younger brothers now were left in Ludwig's care, and his father-now without his wife's hardy support and moderating influence-simply drank himself into a personal and professional collapse. When Johann was forced to resign his modest position in 1789, Beethoven, who was not yet nineteen, successfully petitioned the court to grant him half his father's former salary to help him keep the clan from destitution, becoming in the process the actual head of the household. But although he now had to attend carefully to family matters, Beethoven nonetheless also began to blossom socially in the years that followed his mother's death. He continued to play viola in the orchestras of the court chapel and court theater, forging lasting friendships with other young musicians. He met Count Ferdinand Waldstein, eight years his senior, a music devotee to whom he became closely attached. And it was within the bonds of the prominent, progressive, and intellectually curious Breuning family, headed by the dynamic young widow Helene von Breuning, that Beethoven first was exposed to a kind of joie de vivre that always had been missing in his own home.

He became so closely tied to the Breunings that he often even slept at their home, and along the way he became something of a beloved stepchild to Frau von Breuning: she nursed him through bouts of illness, helped battle his recurrent black moods and sieges of brooding silence, and did her best to buoy up the self-confidence of the young man who at times was paralyzingly shy. It was Frau von Breuning, as well as Count Waldstein and Neefe, who introduced the young man to the thrilling new notions of reform, freedom, and brotherhood-the Aufklarung, or Enlightenment-that were becoming common conversation pieces in the cities that flanked the Rhine and throughout much of central Europe. Yet it was Waldstein who now did the most to nurture Beethoven's musical development. He discreetly provided financial support to the young man whom he openly labeled a musical genius; he commissioned him to compose the music for his own production of a folk ballet; and he was a member as well of a larger group of the Bonn nobility who commissioned Beethoven to compose two cantatas commemorating the death of the much-loved Emperor Joseph II and the elevation of his successor, Leopold II. Although neither cantata was performed, Waldstein nonetheless recognized their brilliance. It is probable that it was he who pressed the Joseph Cantata into the hands of composer Franz Joseph Haydn during his visit to Bonn in 1792 in an effort to convince him to tutor young Beethoven once he was at home in Vienna again, and it is certain that it was Waldstein who convinced his friend Bonn Elector Maximilian Franz, Friedrich's successor, both to pay for Beethoven's journey to Vienna and to support him while he remained in temporary residence there.

The revolution in France that had commenced three years before by now had led to rumors of war across much of Europe. The new French regime had declared war on Austria; French forces already had reached the Rhine, and Beethoven-despite his father's failing health-had to hurry to leave Bonn if he were to be relatively assured of safe travel by coach to Vienna. As he departed, he received enthusiastic farewells from dozens of friends and admirers, all of whom anticipated his return to his hometown before too long a time, and in an album filled with their written good wishes was included this message from his devoted patron: Dear Beethoven: You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is still mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes once more to form a union with another. With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive: Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands. Your true friend, Waldstein.