Beethoven's Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales From the World of Classical Music and Beyond

by Tim Rayborn

  Constanze eventually presented the piece to the unscrupulous count, but not before making a copy and publicly announcing that her late husband had composed it, thus thwarting Walsegg’s unethical scheme. A lawsuit on his part (talk about sour grapes!) was headed off when she bought back the rights from him, thus saving a masterpiece from oblivion, or at least from getting the eighteenth-century lip-syncing treatment.

  Though Wolfgang only partially composed the Requiem, it stands as a triumph. It is a momentous work and a fitting conclusion to his short, brilliant life. But his story doesn’t end here. After his death, his skull—like that of his younger counterpart Beethoven—may or may not have taken a very strange journey, as we will see in Part II.

  Antonio Salieri (1750–1825)

  So what is the real story here?

  Salieri is remembered mostly as the less talented composer who did not like Mozart, kept up an intense rivalry out of jealousy for the younger man’s talent, and may have had something to do with his early death. The story that circulated at the time was revived in the nineteenth century and made into a fabulous play and film in the twentieth, but is any of it actually true? In all honesty, it’s highly unlikely.

  The first whiff of this whole sordid tale seems to have come from Mozart’s father, Leopold, who was always both eager to see his son prosper and suspicious when things didn’t work out for him. He believed there were secret organizations of “Italians” making things difficult for his son and impeding his career. Bear in mind that this was well before The Godfather. There isn’t any real evidence for this suspicion and certainly nothing to connect Salieri to any such group, even if it did exist.

  Perhaps Leopold’s paranoia stemmed from the fact that in 1781, his son applied to be the music teacher of the young Princess of Württemberg, a lucrative court appointment. Salieri, known as a good voice teacher, was chosen instead. The following year, Mozart applied for the position of the piano teacher and was again passed over. These rejections set off red flags in Leopold’s head, but the fact is that many qualified musicians applied for such posts. His suspicions rubbed off on his son, as evidenced in letters between them complaining of the possibility of Salieri meddling to hinder the younger man’s career. However, Mozart and Salieri seemed to have been respectful colleagues, if not great friends.

  Interestingly enough, there are several incidents where Salieri actually helped to further Mozart’s reputation and career. He actively revived Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro in 1788 and saw to it that his masses were performed at the various coronation festivities of Emperor Leopold II in the year before Mozart’s death. The two even composed a work together—a cantata known as Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia—written to celebrate a well-known soprano’s recovery from an illness. Amazingly, it was rediscovered in Prague’s Czech Museum of Music in November 2015 long after it was assumed to be lost. Salieri may have conducted Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor and was apparently greatly impressed with The Magic Flute.

  So, other than Leopold’s sour grapes, where does this rivalry legend come from? There may have been an element of German and Austrian nationalism at work, which at the turn of the nineteenth century was in full swing as the Romantic Movement got under way. Some undoubtedly wanted to exclude foreign (in other words, non-Germanic) musicians and their influence. Maybe a reason needed to be found to explain the loss of the genius at such a young age, and Salieri, the foreigner, was just the convenient patsy. The ironic thing is that even though Salieri was from Italy, he spent most of his life in Vienna and his music is much more influenced by German styles than Italian ones.

  Nevertheless, rumors were whispered that he had murdered Mozart out of jealousy and rage, and it was said that on his deathbed he confessed to the crime. However, the doctor and two nurses who treated him (all of whom were German, incidentally) denied that he had ever made such a confession.

  In any case, Mozart’s music continued to be popular, and it’s possible that Salieri’s was deliberately neglected, which is a shame because it is considerably better than many have been led to believe. In fact, it was rather dumbed-down for Amadeus in order to show the supposed contrast between the two.

  Not long after Salieri died in 1825, Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (yes, the story had reached that far!) wrote his “tragedy” Mozart and Salieri, a play that was conceived as a kind of study on the deadly sin of envy. This work helped to keep the rumor alive in the minds of nineteenth-century music aficionados and literature buffs. As long after the incident as 1898, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov made an adaptation of Pushkin’s play as an opera of the same name, perpetuating the story. Fast forward to our time, with the play and movie Amadeus, and the legend lives on as strong as ever.

  In the end, it seems that Salieri just got a bum rap. He was neither as incompetent as many people believe nor overly jealous of Mozart, at least not enough to try to murder him.

  Jakub Jan Ryba (1765–1815)

  Razor’s edge

  Ryba, a Czech music teacher and composer, is little known today. In his own time he was an important early promoter of the Czech language in his music, one of the first composers to feature it in his art songs. He was regarded for his religious music, and his Christmas mass, Hej, mistře (“Hail, Master”), is still performed in the Czech Republic.

  Ryba had an unsettled life. Though he had aspirations to compose full time and become famous, his father (also a musician) brought him back to reality and ordered him to take up teaching positions for a more stable income. It was a case of the usual concerned, if overbearing, parent.

  Ryba frequently argued with his superiors over various matters and was fired from his first job. Nevertheless, he was devoted to teaching and eventually secured another position, though the conflicts continued with councils and clergy. His work was poorly paid and his requests were frequently ignored, sending him ever deeper into despair. Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer. After attending mass on April 8, 1815, he wandered into a forest near the town of Rožmitál.

  His body was found sometime later. He had cut his own throat and had a copy of Essay on Peace of Soul by Seneca the Younger with him. A favorite author of his, Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was a famous Roman statesman and philosopher forced to commit suicide after being implicated in a plot to assassinate Emperor Nero; he was probably innocent, but as we saw earlier, Nero wasn’t exactly popular. Seneca opened his veins to bleed to death: a calm, if unsettling, way to go.

  Since Ryba’s death was a suicide, he could not be buried in hallowed ground and so was interred in a plague cemetery where, as you can imagine, bodies were hastily disposed. Did he take Seneca’s fate as a model for his own?

  Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

  Hear, hear

  Beethoven, mighty Beethoven. This tragic titan is the most famous composer in the world, regarded, along with Bach and Mozart, as the greatest of all of them. Everyone knows the opening eight notes of his immortal Fifth Symphony, and most are familiar with pieces like the Moonlight Sonata, Für Elise, and the “Ode to Joy” section of his Ninth Symphony. Bridging the transition from late Classical to early Romantic, his late string quartets are regarded as some of the finest “classical” music ever written. Most people know how, incredibly, he struggled with the loss of his hearing and spent the last many years of his life completely deaf, yet was still able to “hear” the music he wrote in his mind perfectly.

  But there was much more to Beethoven’s harsh, difficult, and sad life. It was filled with incredible drama, anger, passion, and quite simply ridiculous turns of events. If anyone crafted a fictional character with a similar biography, they would immediately be dismissed for dreaming up something so improbable and melodramatic; the publisher would probably want the advance returned.

  Beethoven’s unkempt home, his wild shock of hair, and his angry outbursts were the stuff of legend in his own lifetime, all with varying degrees of truth. Despite this chaos (or perhaps because of it),
he achieved unparalleled levels of creative and artistic greatness.

  Literally millions of words have been written about the man, his music, and his life, and the short summary provided here can hardly do him justice. But since we’re focusing mainly on the bizarre, the grotesque, and the unbelievable, here is a snapshot of the high points, or low points, really. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.

  It seems that poor Ludwig got off to a bad start right from the beginning. He was born in Bonn, Germany; his father Johann was an alcoholic, and probably abusive. Seeing his son’s musical talent, he may have attempted to exploit him as a new Mozart-like child prodigy, sending him to various tutors for music lessons, one of whom, Christian Gottlob Neefe, did indeed compare him to Mozart. The young Beethoven pursued music, eventually meeting Mozart and studying with Haydn, both of whom were impressed with the young man’s talent.

  His mother died of tuberculosis when he was sixteen, and at eighteen, he petitioned a court to grant him half of his father’s salary—Johann was a court singer, and his voice was failing—to care for his younger brothers, as their dad had a tendency to wash away his sorrows (and money) at taverns. Ludwig was unmoved when his father died a few years later. Johann’s employer, Archduke Maximilian Francis, noted bluntly that his death had resulted in a loss of revenue from the alcohol tax.

  Despite his harsh upbringing and his understandable distrust of authority, Beethoven seemed on track to make a great name for himself as early as the 1790s: he was performing concerts, taking on very wealthy and high-ranking students, enjoying the patronage of the rich and famous, traveling and performing, and even having his music published. Yes, everything was going his way … except that sometime before 1800, he began to notice that he wasn’t hearing things as well. Undoubtedly, he put it down to other causes at first, but when the awful truth began to dawn on him, he must have resisted it bitterly, even desperately. The one sense he needed above all others, and here it was, fading away from him. Doctors were of no real use; some told him to take cold baths, others told him to take hot baths—neither helped.

  By 1801, he was suffering from fairly severe tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears like what one might experience after being at a loud event, such as a modern rock concert. For poor Beethoven, this condition was permanent. As his talent and reputation grew, his hearing worsened. Painfully aware of it, he wrote at the age of thirty-one that life was withering and fading away. This depression would haunt him for the rest of his life, causing him to cease composition for long periods at a time.

  By 1818, he was completely deaf and had to communicate with people by writing to them and having them write back in “conversation books” that he carried around. There is the famous story of the 1824 premiere of his Ninth Symphony, which received a rapturous response from the audience. He was facing away from the crowd and had to be turned around to see that they were giving him an ovation, since he could not hear even the smallest part of it. All of his last and many of his greatest pieces were written entirely in his “mind’s ear.”

  This alone would be a tragedy enough to wear down most composers, but his life was constantly assaulted with other disappointments and severe stress. His deafness eventually precluded him from performing live, which could be a lucrative means of funding a musician’s life. The alternative—relying on aristocratic patronage—was not always his strong point, as his temper and brusque manner alienated many. Indeed, Beethoven was among the first of the great “suffering Romantics” that we will encounter in the next chapter. Teaching was also impossible, since he could not hear his students’ progress. He increasingly withdrew from human contact.

  Beethoven soon faced new shocks and disappointments, such as when his hero Napoleon had the audacity to declare himself emperor in 1804. Beethoven was furious. He had dedicated his Third Symphony to him. At first, Napoleon seemed to be a liberator and one of the people, but he now showed that he was just as power-mad and greedy as anyone the French Revolution had wanted to replace. Originally entitled the Bonaparte Symphony, the work was renamed the Eroica (“Heroic”) Symphony on publication, the title by which it is still known today.

  It follows almost naturally that such an unfortunate fellow would have major woman troubles all of his life. Being born of common rank, he was always falling for ladies who were too far above him in social position, still a serious issue at the time. Alternately, his admiration was simply unrequited; being deaf, temperamental, and eventually a hard-drinking slob didn’t exactly endear him to a lot of Vienna’s genteel, eligible females. It is truly sad, for he genuinely wanted someone to love but was always denied. It’s not even known for certain if he ever had sexual relations with a woman.

  The fictional film Immortal Beloved explores some of the various romantic possibilities he encountered in his life; the title is based on a letter he wrote in July 1812, addressed to a mysterious “Immortal Beloved” (German: Unsterbliche Geliebte). Never sent, it was discovered among his possessions after his death. The identity of the addressee is unclear, though several women have been proposed as candidates. Indeed, it’s possible that Beethoven may have been loved by one or more women, who were simply not in the social position to express it openly. In any case, he never married and lived alone for the most part (changing residences in Vienna dozens of times throughout his life).

  For some time he was financially well off, but emotionally, things continued their downward spiral. His younger brother Carl died in 1815, and Beethoven was named as guardian of Carl’s nine-year-old son, rather confusingly named Karl. The only problem was that Carl’s widow—the boy’s mother, Johanna—was still alive, and an amendment to the will made by Carl the day before he died decreed that she should have co-guardianship of the boy with Beethoven. For reasons that may have had to do with his need to have a family of his own, he decided that a slander campaign against Johanna was in order. He accused her of theft (she had once been jailed for embezzlement), prostitution, and a number of other crimes, and was ultimately successful in gaining sole custody of the boy. The battle continued for over four years, however, and custody was tossed back and forth like a ball.

  Young Karl eventually came to loathe his uncle and desired to return to his mother. At the age of twenty, he tried to commit suicide with two pistols, shooting himself in the head. As it turned out, he was only wounded and was eventually able to return to his mother’s home and care.

  Beethoven was suffering from the effects of excessive drinking in these last years, and his musical output was sporadic, though still brilliant. The exact cause of death, as is the case with so many of these composers, is disputed. Cirrhosis was likely a contributing factor. Recent theories have suggested that lead poisoning may also have been involved, due to the presence of the metal in a sample of his hair, but this theory has also been disputed as unfounded. Historical forensic science is always tricky.

  In any case, Beethoven left the world in March 1827 during a thunderstorm, an appropriate ending for a stormy, turbulent life. He had made many enemies over the course of fifty-six years, and he never found the loving wife or family he so desired. Nevertheless, people flocked to pay their last respects, including fellow composer Franz Schubert, who admired Beethoven above all others (and who would die soon after; more on him in the next chapter). His funeral, or at least the procession of the coffin, was witnessed by thousands.

  Destined to endure two strange post-mortem incidents, the poor fellow couldn’t rest even in death. The first was a bizarre run-in with later composer and corpse-obsessive Anton Bruckner, who will be covered in the next chapter, and the second involved the possibility of some fragments of his skull ending up in far-away California. This strange after-life journey is detailed in Part II.

  6

  The Romantic Era

  Ah, the Romantic era: gothic mansions holding dark secrets; bleak empty moorland in stormy weather; Byron and Shelley; Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s communism; the Industrial Revolution; morally challenge
d poets in blousy shirts, wasting away from consumption and alcoholism! Here at last is the vision mentioned earlier, embodied in these tragic geniuses who were misunderstood and even despised by the very people they sought to cultivate as admirers. Well yes, some of them were rather weird. The era also embraced the idea of Weltschmerz, a word coined by German writer Jean Paul. It describes a feeling that the real world can never match the ideal world of the mind, a perfect description of the early Romantics.

  This era firmly brought in several modern concepts: music was increasingly performed for the general public, as opposed to the aristocratic patrons and invite-only audiences that had characterized so many concerts of earlier times. Program music, the idea of a composition based on an external idea (a story, a theme, or a poem) became popular. Extreme virtuosity in technique (Liszt’s piano pieces, for example) was highly appreciated. Long and extended works with recurring themes (Wagner’s Ring Cycle, anyone?) and symbolism in sound were equally popular. And oh yes, there was that classic: the musician needing a day job to make ends meet. Actually, we could have done without that one. From the Romantic notions of a return to nature in the earlier part of the century to the increased industrialization of the Western world by the end of it, this era brought profound and permanent changes to the way that music was conceived, performed, and experienced.

  In a time of great cultural upheaval, revolution, nationalism, scientific progress, and creativity, what better way to start this chapter than with that topic near and dear to so many musicians’ hearts, or rather, elsewhere: social diseases!