Overview

The first granular study of nineteenth-century composer devotion—a network of devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics, rituals, pilgrimage, exhumation, and embalming. During the nineteenth century, music institutions promoted artworks they deemed timeless and made composers into figureheads of a lasting Western canon. Alongside this institutional face of the canon was a more intimate impulse to preserve, touch, and embrace the residues of the dead. In Germany and Austria between 1870 and 1930, music lovers venerated the bodies, houses, and belongings of composers as relics, shrines, and talismans. In The Composer Embalmed, Abigail Fine documents the vernacular and eccentric ways that composers have been remembered. Fine navigates a wealth of unknown archival material to recover the stories of devotees: from pilgrims who felt time stop in historic houses to music-loving doctors who made skulls into sacred specimens, dilettantes who displayed Beethoven's mask as a relic of the ""beautiful death,"" and interwar critics of those dilettantes who disparaged piety as a false religion, a kitsch replica. In isolation, these practices may look like simple acts of affection. But in the aggregate, Fine asserts, acts of devotion constituted what we might broadly understand as relic culture—a culture that sought to possess the body of the departed genius, and that superimposed habits of anthropological collecting onto artifacts of Austro-German heritage. By excavating objects, ephemera, amateur lyric, visitors' books, letters, and travelogues, The Composer Embalmed reveals the underbelly of the canon, where guilty pleasures blur the boundary between sanctity and desecration.

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9780226840444

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Reviews

""Fine focuses on the esteem in middle-class, consumerist Germany and Austria between 1870 and 1930 for buried bodies, abodes, and tokens of 18th- and 19th-century musical composers. . . . Based on gems such as old museum guest books and German and Austrian archival holdings, this is a worthwhile, scholarly, and challenging intellectual and cultural history."" * Library Journal * ""Fine's granular study The Composer Embalmed explains the development of this continuing 19th-century devotion, and how admiration veered into religious fervor as [composers'] belongings and bodies became relics. . . Herewith the beginnings of today's exit-through-the-gift-shop culture. . . Fine focuses on Austro-German heritage in this fascinating account that through careful excavation of hitherto neglected sources offers valuable insights into the origins of the Western canon."" * BBC Music Magazine * “Who knew canon formation could be a form of erotica? Fine’s page-turner traces the relics, pilgrimages, and poetry that formed the rituals and liturgy of composer devotion, with special attention to the role of women devotees. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, The Composer Embalmed is a genuine delight to read.” * Joy H. Calico, University of California, Los Angeles * “The Composer Embalmed asks how such household names as Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Liszt became part of a persistently feted canon of Western classical composers. In a totally unprecedented rush of documentary detail, with vivid narration and persuasive argumentation, Fine shows that these composers and others were quickly elevated with quasi-religious fervor to the status of icons by their fans, who cherished and worshipped (and hoarded, stole, counterfeited, dissected) their possessions and their bodies themselves.” * Kevin C. Karnes, Emory University *

“Who knew canon formation could be a form of erotica? Fine’s page-turner traces the relics, pilgrimages, and poetry that formed the rituals and liturgy of composer devotion, with special attention to the role of women devotees. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, The Composer Embalmed is a genuine delight to read.” * Joy H. Calico, University of California, Los Angeles * “The Composer Embalmed asks how such household names as Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Liszt became part of a persistently feted canon of Western classical composers. In a totally unprecedented rush of documentary detail, with vivid narration and persuasive argumentation, Fine shows that these composers and others were quickly elevated with quasi-religious fervor to the status of icons by their fans, who cherished and worshipped (and hoarded, stole, counterfeited, dissected) their possessions and their bodies themselves.” * Kevin C. Karnes, Emory University *

Author Information

Abigail Fine is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Oregon.

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