Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  CRANIOKLEPTY

  CRANIOKLEPTY

  GRAVE ROBBING

  AND THE

  SEARCH FOR GENIUS

  COLIN DICKEY

  Copyright © 2009

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  Dickey, Colin.

  Cranioklepty : grave robbing and the search for genius / Colin Dickey.

  p. ; cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-932961-86-7

  1. Skull. 2. Grave robbing—History. I. Title.

  [DNLM: 1. Grave Robbing—history. 2. Famous Persons. 3. History,

  19th Century. 4. History, 20th Century. 5. Phrenology—history.

  6. Skull. WZ 320 D551c 2009]

  QM105.D53 2009

  612.7’5—dc22

  2009018527

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book Design by SH • CV

  First Printing

  The end of the story isn’t the end of the story at all. It’s simply the opening shot in the next story: the necrological sequel, the story of the writer’s after-life, the tale of the graveyard things to follow.

  • MALCOLM BRADBURY, TO THE HERMITAGE •

  FOR ALEX, AUDREY, AND SHANE

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: Non Omnis Moriar

  PART ONE

  A MOST VALUABLE RELIC

  1. Mapping the Invisible

  2. The Music Lover

  3. “So Was She, So She Is Now”

  4. The Golden Lyre

  5. “All the Ferrets Were Set in Motion”

  PART TWO

  THE ALCHEMICAL BODY

  6. “The Riddle-Filled Book of Destiny”

  7. The New Science

  8. Skulduggery

  9. The Brainowner and His Skull

  10. Fragments of a Mystery

  PART THREE

  THE FATE OF HIS BONES

  11. A City of Corpses

  12. Scientific Golgothas

  13. A Measure of Fame

  14. Some Last Pathetic Quibbling

  15. Homo Renaissancus

  PART FOUR

  REPATRIATIONS

  16. Homecomings

  17. Rival Skulls

  18. The Ruined Bridges to the Past

  19. Hoaxes and Ringers

  20. The End of the End of the Story

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX OF NAMES

  PROLOGUE

  NON OMNIS MORIAR

  At 2 o’clock in the afternoon on October 30, 1820, workers disinterred the body of the composer Joseph Haydn from his grave in the Hundsthurmer Church in Vienna, preparing it for transit to the nearby city of Eisenstadt, home of his powerful patrons, the Esterhazy family. There it was to be reburied in a tomb more worthy of the great composer, who had lain for too long in such a modest setting.

  But there was a problem with what the grave diggers found that day.

  HAYDN HAD LIVED much of his life between the two great musical cities of Austria: Vienna and Eisenstadt. Twenty miles to the northeast of Vienna, Eisenstadt had been home to the Esterhazy family since 1648; in 1687 Paul Esterhazy was elevated from a baron to a prince of the Holy Roman Empire as a reward for his fierce loyalty to the emperor. Paul was also an amateur composer; played the piano, flute, and lute; and passed down to his progeny not just his title but also his love of music. Prince Paul’s son, Paul Anton, was the first Esterhazy to hire Joseph Haydn as a Kapellmeister (a post whose duties included, primarily, composer-in-residence and artistic director of the orchestra). Except for a brief sojourn in London in the 1790s, Haydn would serve the Esterhazy family in that capacity until his death in 1809 at the age of seventy-seven. Much of his fame and success were inextricably tied to their patronage, so it seemed fitting that Prince Nicholas II, Paul Anton’s successor, honor the composer with a tomb on the Esterhazy estate worthy of his talent.

  But history had gotten in the way. Haydn had died during the battle of Wagram, the largest battle yet fought during the Napoleonic Wars. As the French had marched in from the west, Austria had quickly abandoned Vienna. Haydn faced this invasion (the third in a decade) with resolve: As the cannonballs fell all around his home, he told his family, “Children, don’t be frightened; where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you.”1 But three weeks into the occupation, the chaos and misery having taken their toll on the aging composer, Franz Joseph Haydn died from exhaustion.

  In such a cataclysmic situation, the death of a composer— even the most famous composer of the day—could not receive the ceremony it deserved, so Haydn’s was a simple burial in the Gumpendorf suburb of Vienna, in the Hundsthurmer Church. When the fighting was over, Nicholas applied for and received a permit to move the composer’s body to Eisenstadt, but he never acted on it, and the body remained in the graveyard where it had originally been laid.

  Five years later, one of Haydn’s former pupils, Sigismund Neukomm, erected a small marble marker over his grave with the simple inscription Non omnis moriar. The line, from the end of Horace’s odes, translates as “Not all of me shall die,” which Neukomm obviously meant as a reference to the lasting musical genius of his mentor. Although the composer’s genius and his music did indeed live on, his grave remained unmolested for the next six years.

  IT WAS NOT until 1820, eleven years after Haydn’s death, that Nicholas II was reminded of his obligation to the composer. That autumn he had held a gala celebration to honor a visiting dignitary, Adolfo Frederick, the duke of Cambridge. On the program for the evening was The Creation, Haydn’s late oratorio, considered by many to be his masterpiece. Based on the Book of Genesis, The Creation had become a hallmark of the Romantic notion of “the sublime”—the sense of being so overpowered by art that the feeling verges on terror, where “the mind is so entirely filled with its object,” in Edmund Burke’s definition, “that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object that employs it.”2 As Gustav Schilling would write thirty-five years after its premiere, “there is still no music of greater sublimity than the passage ‘And There Was Light’ which follows ‘and God said’ in Haydn’s Creation.”3

  Nicholas II was not quite the lover of music that his forebears had been, but he recognized its effect on those around him and had employed Haydn and a large symphony as much to enhance his status as from any love of the composer’s works. But even though he may have preferred simple church music, Nicholas knew the impact that The Creation could have on audiences, and when he wanted to impress foreign dignitaries such as Adolfo Frederick, it was a natural choice. It certainly did the trick. After the performance, Frederick, visibly moved, remarked, “How fortunate was the man who employed this Haydn in his lifetime and now possesses his mortal remains.”4

  Prince Esterhazy took the compliment graciously without letting on that he did not actually possess the body of the composer. The next day he began preparations to move the body to Eisenstadt, fearing the damage to his reputation should it come to light that he had accorded so little respect to Haydn’s remains. The prince had to reapply to the Hapsburg emperor for permission to move the body and, once he received it, set about exhuming and transporting Haydn’s corpse. Only then did he discover, on that cold afternoon in late October, that someone had beaten him to it. When the grave was opened, the grave diggers found the body intact, but all that was left of the composer’s head was the wig it had been buried in.

  ESTERHAZY WAS OUTRAGED. He immediately notified the president of the supreme office of police, Count Joseph von Sedlintzky, demanding an investigation. The Viennese police were generally held in high regard and were known for being efficient, cordial, and fair. In order
to do their job more effectively, the police employed a wide network of informants known as mouches— the French word for “flies.” Penetrating all layers of society, les mouches were always looking for information that could be converted into ready money. When Sedlintzky’s men came to them for information, they did not disappoint—but then again, the owner of Haydn’s head had not been particularly discreet. After two weeks the investigators, aided by this network of informants, found someone who seemed to know something.

  On November 13, a pharmacist named Joseph Schwinner told them that he had once seen a skull in the possession of a man named Johann Nepomuk Peter. “At the period during which Peter was still the administrator of the tallow works, I was often in his garden,” Schwinner told the police. “On the occasion of such a visit approximately ten years ago, he showed me and other close friends . . . a skull from which the flesh had been completely removed.” Peter was proud of his trophy, Schwinner explained, and made no attempt to hide its origin. “He remarked that it was the head of the recently deceased composer of music, Haydn.” Schwinner never inquired as to how Peter had come by the skull, but he did see the head again five years later. “Peter,” he concluded, “mentioned each time that the head was Haydn’s.”5

  Peter himself seemed perfectly forthcoming when the police questioned him the next day. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. He claimed that a certain Dr. Leopold Eckhart, a physician at the Vienna General Hospital, “with whom I had a close personal relationship and who also knew of my interest in the Gall system, gave me an already macerated head purported to be that of the composer of music, Haydn.”

  The “Gall system” Peter spoke of was “cranioscopy,” or “phrenology,” as it would come to be called. Invented by Franz Joseph Gall, it had swept Europe, in particular Vienna, as a means by which one could divine the workings of the brain from bumps and indentations on the skull. Gall had collected hundreds of human skulls in his quest to substantiate his ideas, and his theories had sparked an interest in the skull as a collector’s object. “I bleached it in my garden and then mounted it on a velvet cushion in a small case,” Peter told the authorities. “During the bleaching process and later, I showed the skull to my friends as Haydn’s head.”

  But Peter went on to suggest that the skull Schwinner had seen was not in fact Haydn’s. The identity of the skull was called into question, he told them, “first and foremost by the clerk to Count Esterhazy,” Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, “a very close friend and former schoolfellow of mine.” As a result of Rosenbaum’s skepticism, Peter claimed, he lost interest in the skull: “So it happened,” he said, “that my wife had several skulls removed to the graveyard, and the aforementioned Rosenbaum received three as a present; he himself chose the ones he wanted, among them the head alleged to be Haydn’s.”

  Peter had no idea that Eckhart had come by the skull through any illegal means, and had he known, he told the police, he would have returned it long before. When he had first heard of the investigation, he quickly added, he had returned to Rosenbaum and asked for the head back. He now had the head again and was prepared to give it to the authorities. At this point Peter handed over a skull to the police, swearing that “it is the same head Eckhart gave me as Haydn’s and which I showed to my friends as such.”6

  Thinking they had now recovered the skull, the police went to Rosenbaum the following day to corroborate the story. Rosenbaum had a much higher social standing than his longtime friend Herr Peter: A court secretary, he was married to one of the two most famous sopranos in Vienna and had been a personal friend of Haydn’s—not to mention dozens of other noteworthy composers and musicians. He was well liked and respected throughout Viennese society. He had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday and had treated the two hundred guests in attendance to a cantata composed in his honor by the current Kapellmeister Kinsky, followed by a fireworks display.

  Rosenbaum’s story meshed perfectly with Peter’s. “I am a childhood friend of Herr Peter’s,” he said, and explained that Peter, as a passionate admirer of the Gall system, had received several skulls from the then senior physician at the Vienna General Hospital, Dr. Leopold Eckhart. Among them was one that Peter had passed off as Haydn’s. “However,” Rosenbaum informed them, “Peter later discontinued that hobby.” At the time, none of the investigators made note of the fact that the language Rosenbaum used was nearly identical to Peter’s—almost as if the two men had rehearsed their stories together. “And so it happened that I received three of the skulls from Peter as gifts, but not at the same time. Among them was the head alleged to be Haydn’s.” Rosenbaum concluded his story by affirming that, a few days earlier, “Peter urgently demanded that the head be returned,” and that Rosenbaum had complied, to Peter’s “great relief.”7

  Peter and Rosenbaum had both known Leopold Eckhart for years; he had been personal physician to both men. Having died, the doctor was in no position to rebut Peter and Rosenbaum’s implication that it was he who had stolen the skull. But there were problems with the story nonetheless. The first skull they handed over turned out to be from a much younger body; a cursory inspection revealed that its owner had likely been in his twenties when he had died, not in his seventies.

  The police went back to Rosenbaum and insisted on searching his premises for the right skull; Rosenbaum had no choice but to let them in. They searched the entire house and found nothing out of the ordinary, except that when they came to the bedroom they found his wife, Therese, lying awkwardly in bed. This was a bit unusual, since it was the middle of the day and she didn’t appear to be ill, but it would have been inappropriate to ask the lady to allow them to search her bed, or even to ask her to stand up. The police left empty-handed.

  PRINCE NICHOLAS FOLLOWED these events with increasing agitation. After learning that Rosenbaum was involved, he was doubly incensed. Rosenbaum had worked for the prince over twenty years earlier but had resigned following a contentious falling-out. The idea of having anything more to do with this man was deeply distasteful to the prince, but as word continued to spread that he had lost track of his composer’s skull, it became increasingly important simply to get it back, no matter the cost. Convinced that Rosenbaum knew more than he was letting on, the prince resorted to bribery, offering a substantial amount to Rosenbaum if he could cause the head to reappear by whatever means necessary.

  And so a few days later Rosenbaum turned over another skull. It had clearly belonged to an older man and seemed to match Haydn’s physique in other regards, so it was made ready to be reburied with the rest of the composer’s remains. The prince, however, did not bother to honor his promise of a bribe; having secured the head, he summarily dismissed Rosenbaum.

  Haydn’s headless body was in Eisenstadt by this time, and the prince had to forward the head “that was purloined by malicious persons but which has been recovered by the civil authorities.”8 On December 4, over a month after the theft was first discovered, the provost of the Esterhazy crypt interred the skull with the rest of the body. The prince had ordered that the bodily reunion be done in secret to avoid public humiliation. There had already been a fair amount of laughter at the prince’s expense over his inability to keep track of his favorite composer’s remains, and he was not anxious for the people in Eisenstadt to learn what too many in Vienna already knew. And so the provost entered the crypt under the pretense of affixing a small nameplate to the coffin; alone, he unscrewed and removed the coffin lid, then placed the skull in its proper position before resealing the coffin and affixing the nameplate.

  And that would have been that. But as Haydn’s pupil Sigismund Neukomm had inadvertently foreseen, at least a part of Haydn was to live on for quite some time. It did not come to light until much later—what neither the police chief or the prince himself could have known—that the head enshrined with the composer’s remains was not in fact Haydn’s. It was just as well, then, that the prince had reneged on his offer of payment to Rosenbaum since the clerk had delivered the wrong head to
the authorities. Had they thought to ask Therese Rosenbaum to get out of bed, or had they simply checked the mattress on which she was lying, they would have found what they were looking for: the head of Franz Joseph Haydn, which Peter and Rosenbaum had brazenly stolen eleven years before, less than a week after Haydn was buried. It would be over a century before that skull found its way back into the ground.

  PART ONE

  A MOST VALUABLE RELIC

  Poor skull, thy fingers set ablaze,

  With silver Saint in golden rays,

  The holy missal. Thou didst craze

  ’Mid bead and spangle,

  While others passed their idle days,

  In coil and wrangle.

  • JOHN KEATS AND CHARLES BROWN,

  “Stanzas on Some Skulls in

  Beauly Abbey, near Inverness”

  CHAPTER ONE

  MAPPING THE INVISIBLE

  The theft of Franz Joseph Haydn’s skull in 1809 was by no means an isolated incident. From the 1790s to the mid—nineteenth century, interest in phrenology sparked a bizarre and intense fascination with the human skull, and in particular with the skulls of great men. Just as phrenologists looked to the heads of criminals and the insane for proof of pathological deficiencies, they also sought out the heads of artists and philosophers for proof of genius and intelligence. Often they could investigate the heads of great men by taking plaster casts, but sometimes other means were necessary.

  Francisco Goya had died in exile in Bordeaux in 1828 and lost his skull sometime before 1898, when the Spanish government exhumed his remains to return them to his home country. Upon discovering the theft, the Spanish consul dispatched a telegram to Madrid: “Goya skeleton without a head. Please instruct me.” The response came back immediately: “Send Goya, with or without head.”9