by Colin Dickey
AMONG THOSE PRESENT during the maestro’s final days was a young boy named Gerhard von Breuning whose father, Stephan, had been a childhood friend of the composer. Stephan and Beethoven’s relationship had gone through rough patches, including a ten-year period during which they stopped speaking altogether. But in 1825 they had reconciled after Beethoven had sent Stephan a miniature portrait accompanied by a letter pledging absolute devotion: “I know, I have wounded your heart, but my own emotions, which you must certainly have noticed, have punished me enough. It was not malice towards you that was in my mind . . . it was passion in you and in me.”76 Shortly thereafter, the composer moved around the corner from the Breunings—to a house that had once been a monastery and was called Schwarzspanierhaus, “House of the Black-Robed Spaniards”— and their friendship had resumed as if without a hitch.
Gerhard, who was twelve at the time, struck up a fast friendship with the composer, who referred to the young boy affectionately as either “Trouserbutton” (because he stuck to Beethoven like a button to a garment) or “Ariel” (after the ephemeral spirit from Shakespeare’s The Tempest). It was Gerhard who, in his own immature way, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Beethoven was stone-deaf and could not even hear music, as some had alleged: When Gerhard arrived early for his music lesson one day, Beethoven asked the boy to wait while he finished work on a quartet. Bored, Gerhard went to the piano, where Beethoven could not see him, and began to play lightly. “I kept looking in his direction to see whether he might be feeling bothered,” Gerhard later recalled. “When I saw that he was completely unaware of it, I played louder, and intentionally quite loudly—and I had no more doubts.”77
In two short years Beethoven and Gerhard grew extremely fond of one another, and when the composer’s health failed, Gerhard and his father were among those who kept constant vigil. Beethoven had designated Stephan as his executor, and it fell to Stephan to put his affairs in order. On the afternoon of Monday, March 26, Stephan went to see about securing a grave plot for Beethoven in the Währing cemetery—where his own family plot was, so that he could be close to his childhood friend in death— while Gerhard remained at the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards. “I had stayed in the room of the dying man with Beethoven’s brother Johann and Sali the housekeeper,” he later recalled.
It was between four and five o’clock; the dense clouds drifting together from every quarter increasingly obscured the daylight and, all of a sudden, a violent storm broke, with driving snow and hail. Just as in the immortal Fifth Symphony and the everlasting Ninth there are crashes that sound like a hammering on the portals of Fate, so the heavens seemed to be using their gigantic drums to signal the bitter blow they had just dealt the world of art. At about 5:15 I was called home to my teacher. The end could be expected any minute; I left him alive, or at least still breathing, for the last time.78
A half hour later, the composer was dead. Fellow composer and friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner was one of the few present at the moment of death, and described the scene even more poetically. After a loud crash of thunder, he wrote, “Beethoven opened his eyes, raised his right hand, and gazed fixedly upwards for some seconds, with clenched fist, and a solemn threatening expression, as if he would say: ‘I defy you, ye adverse powers, Depart! God is with me.’ Or his appearance may be described as that of a brave general, exclaiming to his fainting troops: ‘Courage, soldiers! Forward! Trust in me! Victory is ours!’” Many saw portents in the thunderstorm that day; even Wawruch later asked, “Would a Roman augury not have concluded that the chance uproar of the elements was related to his apotheosis?”79
MYSTERIES SURROUND BEETHOVEN’S death, his final days, and his afterlife. Much of the confusion stems from Anton Schindler, an acquaintance of Beethoven who took it upon himself to write the first major biography of the composer. Peppering his work with exaggerations and outright fabrications, Schindler used his book to aggrandize himself and persecute his enemies, in the process distorting much of the historical record regarding the composer. This biography, along with Beethoven’s troubled and peculiar health throughout his life, the dizzying number of symptoms recorded by his doctors, and the mystifying way in which his body was handled after his death, has left a record of a life with so many gaps and inconsistencies that the truth about the composer may never be fully known.
There are unanswered questions surrounding the way he died. What caused the dramatic and sustained illnesses that Beethoven suffered in the final years of his life? Was there some root source—such as lead poisoning or treatment with mercury—that might account for the host of symptoms? What led to the fatal edema that caused his body to fill with fluid? Could Wawruch have done more for him? Was the original diagnosis of pneumonia a fatal error, and could more have been done if Wawruch had recognized the edema earlier?
There is the mystery of the composer’s deafness. Like the deaths of Mozart and Napoleon, the source of Beethoven’s deafness has been one of those enduring medical mysteries over which musicologists, doctors, and historians have puzzled for close to two centuries now without arriving at anything close to a definitive answer. In 1879 George Grove postulated that the composer’s symptoms were “most probably the result of syphilitic affections at an early age in life.”80 Though only vague, circumstantial evidence exists for this idea, the hypothesis has stubbornly persisted—in the century since Grove’s first suggestion, dozens of commentators have repeated the diagnosis. But over the past two centuries a host of other theories have been advocated to explain Beethoven’s deafness, including alcoholism, amyloidosis, arteriosclerosis, brucellosis, cerebral congestion, drug-induced ototoxicity, otitis media, otosclerosis, Paget’s disease of the skull, presbycusis, rheumatism, sarcoidosis, acoustic neuritis, tuberculosis, typhus fever, and Whipple’s disease. Peter J. Davies assessed all these theories in 2001 and was unable to offer a final conclusion (though he was able to debunk a good number of them)—each diagnosis matched some symptoms, it seemed, but most were ruled out by others.81
There is also the mysterious lock of Beethoven’s hair that appeared for sale after World War II. This memento (now known as the “Guevara Lock”), which became the subject of a book by Russell Martin, was clipped from the maestro’s head by the composer Ferdinand Hiller while the body lay in state and was passed on to Hiller’s son Paul in 1883. But in the tumult of the early twentieth century both Paul and the lock of hair disappeared. Improbably, the lock turned up in the Danish town of Gilleleje in 1943, in the hands of Kay Fremming, a doctor working to give safe passage to Jewish refugees as the Nazis occupied Denmark. But the circumstances of the lock’s travels over the missing years remain obscured, despite Martin’s extensive research. How it got to Gilleleje, who gave it to Fremming, and what happened to Paul Hiller may never be known.82
Finally there is the mystery of Beethoven’s skull, which was broken into fragments during the initial autopsy. Over the next fifty years, several of these fragments were stolen. Who took them, and why? Why just these fragments and not the whole head? And where did they end up? So many questions unanswered, so much hidden in what Gerhard von Breuning called “the riddle-filled book of destiny.”
MUCH OF THE mystery stems from the odd way the body was handled during the autopsy. The head surgeon was named Johann Wagner; Beethoven’s primary physician, Dr. Andreas Wawruch, also attended. Wagner was assisted by a young doctor named Carl von Rokitansky. It remains unclear who authorized the autopsy, though as executor, Stephan von Breuning must certainly have been involved. That Beethoven wanted an autopsy could be inferred from his 1802 will: “As soon as I am dead and if Dr. Schmidt is still alive, ask him in my name to describe my malady, and attach this written document [to his account] of the history of my illness, so that at least as far as is possible the world may become reconciled to me after my death.” Dr. Schmidt had died years earlier, so Stephan turned to Wagner and his young assistant Rokitansky.83
Wagner and Rokitansky found a body wracked with disease. “
The body of the dead man showed intense wasting,” Wagner wrote in the autopsy report; “the abdomen was distended and swollen with fluid and its skin was stretched.” The report, in Latin, went on to note that the abdominal cavity “was filled with four measures of rust-colored fluid. The liver was reduced to half its normal size, was like leather, hard and in color slightly bluish-green and throughout its substance were nodes each about the size of a bean.” In their report the doctors were careful to note the condition of the brain and the skull, which was no doubt useful for phrenologists eager to understand the composer and his genius. The sulci (the folds and convolutions of the brain) were, they noted, “twice as deep as usual and (much) more numerous than is usually seen,” and the skull was abnormally thick.84
Such a discovery was fitting for Beethoven: After his brother Johann had sent him a New Year’s greeting in 1823 signed “The Landowner,” Beethoven had signed his reply “The Brainowner.” Wagner’s knife had finally proved the fitting nature of the epithet.85
In order to get access to the brain, Wagner had sawed apart the skull, cutting off the top and segmenting it into its individual bones. But either he had been in a hurry or he was simply careless because he butchered the job. Ideally, one cuts as close to the seams of the skull as possible, using a fine saw so that the head can be neatly reassembled after the autopsy. But Wagner was extremely rough with the composer’s skull, shredding the bone as he cut it apart—bone splinters and fragments were irretrievably lost, and when the work was done the doctors could only loosely fit the remaining pieces back together.
Because of this, Beethoven’s body was in sad shape when it was put on display in the days before his burial. His lower jaw jutted forward in a grotesque manner, and his temples were misshapen and lumpy, as if his face were falling in from the sides. The head was wreathed with a crown of white roses, most likely as a means of hiding the extreme indignity it had suffered under the hands of Wagner and Rokitansky.
But this still was Beethoven, and his corpse’s aura remained for those who admired and loved him. The composer Franz von Hartmann later stated that there “was a celestial dignity about him, despite the disfiguration he was said to have suffered . . . that I could not look at him long enough.” Hartmann could not help but notice that there was “already a strong cadaverous smell,” but he was deeply moved nonetheless. So deeply, in fact, that he left Beethoven’s rooms and was nearly to the street before he remembered his main purpose for coming: He wanted a souvenir of the maestro, specifically a lock of hair.
Hartmann returned up the stairs for a second viewing, tipping the caretaker hired to watch the body and begging him “for a few of Beethoven’s hairs.” The caretaker motioned for Hartmann to wait while the other spectators—three “fops” who stood there “tapping their swagger-sticks on their pantaloons while looking at the dead man”—to leave. He then silently cut a lock of hair and handed it to Hartmann, who left, he later wrote, with a feeling of “mournful joy.”86
Hartmann was not alone. Mourners who came continually begged to take away bits of Beethoven’s hair as a memento. Hüttenbrenner had been given a lock of the composer’s hair by Beethoven’s sister-in-law just after the maestro died, and numerous others bribed or cajoled his caretakers into handing over souvenirs. Among them was the composer Ferdinand Hiller, whose treasure would wend the strange 170-year journey described by Russell Martin.
Gerhard von Breuning, too, had hoped to take a lock of hair as a souvenir, but his father—now ill himself and still deeply distraught over the loss of his friend—forbade it. Gerhard later remembered, “Father had not allowed me to do this before the lying-in-state ended, in order not to spoil his appearance; but now we found that strangers had already cut off all his hair.”87 Gerhard found this truly galling. Who were these other men—Hiller and Hartmann and Hüttenbrenner and countless others? Only casual acquaintances, factotums, and treasure-hunting strangers. Yet they all now had precious relics of the great Beethoven, while he, son of the maestro’s closest friend, had nothing.
HAIR WAS ONE thing, but Stephan von Breuning soon began to hear much more disturbing rumors. Beethoven’s funeral took place on March 29, with a swelling crowd of over twenty thousand mourners accompanying the cortege, but there were some in the crowd who wanted more than simply to pay their respects. Four days after the funeral Anton Schindler told Stephan that the grave digger had “visited us yesterday and told us that someone, in a note that he showed us, had offered him 1,000 guldens C. M. if he would deposit the head of Beethoven at a specified location.”88
It was never made clear who this someone was. Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, now fifty-seven, still had Haydn’s head, but his days of skull-stealing were over (he would be dead in less than two years). By this point there were certainly any number of relic-seekers who would have followed in Rosenbaum’s footsteps if given the chance.
Schindler noted that the police were investigating, but Breuning knew he could not rely on them. It was in fact not the first he had heard of such a plot—the rumor that someone wanted to steal the skull of Beethoven had been circulating for days. So persistently, in fact, that Breuning had hired watchmen to guard the grave and had even considered burying the body in a reversed position so that the feet, not the head, would be closest to the cemetery’s outer wall. As Gerhard later explained, “The idea was that, although the watchmen had been engaged for the first few nights, there was a good chance they might doze off and it would be possible to tunnel under the wall and reach the head.”89
The fear of some desecration of the composer’s corpse continued to prey on Stephan. He had already seen the terrible disfigurement of the body from the autopsy he had authorized, and the fact that relic-hunters had cut off all of the composer’s hair while he lay in state only added insult to injury. While the plan to reverse the body was ultimately abandoned, Stephan had a massive layer of bricks laid over the coffin so as to deter any would-be cranioklepts.
Still, when Schindler told him that unknown persons were out for the skull, Stephan was not about to count on his brick wall to keep the body safe. His chief worry was the sexton, who would certainly have the time in the dead of night to break through any defense. Even though it was the sexton who had come forward to Schindler and Breuning with the anonymous note, Stephan was convinced it was a shakedown and that the sexton had had a hand in creating the ominous letter. Exhausted, Stephan gave in: He plaintively offered the grave digger a substantial sum of money and begged him to leave the body alone.
But the grave digger of Währing turned out to be surprisingly ethical. Twenty years earlier Joseph Carl Rosenbaum had profited from a down-on-his-luck grave digger who’d lost everything in a tumultuous time, but Beethoven’s remains benefited from far more stable circumstances. The sexton refused Stephan’s money, assuring the gentleman that he had no intention of violating the body. He only wanted to do what was right, he said, and wanted Stephan to know that there might be forces out there stronger than either of them with designs on Beethoven’s head. Stephan rehired the guards to stand watch and hoped for the best.
Meanwhile, he did his best to get his friend’s estate in order. He organized an auction of Beethoven’s furniture and effects, and though he himself was seriously ill and exhausted, he forced himself to oversee the auction to prevent any theft or dubious transactions. The sight of his friend’s life broken into lots and manhandled by the auctioneers was too much for Stephan: “As a result of these distressing scenes at the auction in the room where Beethoven had died,” Gerhard later recorded, “my father suffered a relapse, with an inflamed liver that soon confined him to his bed, and on June 4 of the same year . . . he followed his exalted friend into the beyond.”90
Writing of this later in life, Gerhard did not dwell on the fact that he had been orphaned at fourteen. In his memoir, immediately after relating his father’s passing, Gerhard wrote, “I was only fourteen and learned of the second auction, in November 1827, of the intellectual effects of Beethov
en only after it was over. And so I have none of all the valuable manuscripts and autographs that got into other hands, always at low prices, sometimes ridiculously cheap; and all the more so because my father had strictly forbidden me to take even the smallest scrap of what Beethoven, when alive, would have given me by the armful if it had entered my mind to ask him for it.”91
“PLAUDITE AMICA, FINITE est comedia”— so Beethoven is supposed to have said after receiving the last rites—“Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.” In his memoirs, Breuning ended his lengthy description of Beethoven’s final days with a slightly altered version: “Tragoedia finite erat”—“The tragedy was finished.” But there was still more of the story to be told, so he added, “Everything we now have to say no longer relates to the living Beethoven among us, but only to the heritage of his genius, his immortal creations.”92 To this musical heritage add the fate of his unfortunate remains, battered and picked apart by doctors, well-wishers, and phrenologists.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NEW SCIENCE
By this time phrenology had gone from a dubious scientific theory to a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Unlike Gall’s organology, the brand of phrenology advocated by his star pupil, Johann Spurzheim, focused not just on identifying the various mental functions of the brain but on the possibility of actual self-improvement through phrenology. Though the two doctors had been inseparable through the early nineteenth century, in 1814 this philosophical difference erupted: Gall accused Spurzheim of distorting the project of organology, of turning his science into pop philosophy, and denounced his former pupil, calling him a fraud and a plagiarist.
