Beethoven's Hair

The basis for the movie of the same name, an astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels—from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.

When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven's hair as a keepsake—as was custom at the time—in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way t...