by Colin Dickey
The Society for the Friends of Music was founded in 1812 in an attempt to stem the decline of music appreciation and attendance in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. In its nearly two hundred–year history it has established itself as one of the preeminent classical music organizations and has counted in its ranks dozens of notable composers and conductors. In 1870 construction would be complete on the Society’s Musikverien, a concert hall that still ranks among the finest in the world, but even by 1863 it had become the preeminent musical institution in Vienna, and as such its authority in matters concerning the city’s beloved composers was relatively unquestioned.
The exhumation was paid for by a special concert “playing exclusively compositions by the deceased, in order to erect a monument with the proceeds,” and it was decided that the exhumations of Beethoven and Schubert would happen simultaneously.132 There was a certain poetic quality to this decision since Schubert’s death was itself connected to Beethoven’s. According to a possibly apocryphal story, on the evening of Beethoven’s funeral a number of his friends and fellow composers had gathered at a local inn to celebrate their deceased friend. “To the memory of our immortal Beethoven!” Schubert is supposed to have said, and after the first toast was drunk, he lifted his glass once more and said, “And now to the first of us to follow Beethoven!” He was toasting himself; of those assembled, he was the first to die, on November 19, 1828.133
Linked in death, they were now to be linked in exhumation. The Society for the Friends of Music could count in its ranks a fair number of doctors, and the society’s board appointed a committee that would be present to handle the treatment of the remains while their new coffins were prepared. In charge of Schubert was a doctor named Joseph Standthartner. In charge of Beethoven was “Trouserbutton” himself, Gerhard von Breuning.
In the years after his father died Gerhard trained as a doctor, attending the Josephinian Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1837. He began his career as a military doctor and for a time was the chief physician at the Imperial Royal Invalids Home before switching to private practice in 1852. His early friendship with Beethoven had cemented a lifelong love of music, and he had long since become a member of the board of the Society of the Friends of Music. Even as he established himself as a surgeon of some repute, it’s fair to say that Beethoven never left him. Like Rosenbaum, he lived a dual life: one of empirical facts, rational logic, knowable information; the other the ineffable world of music.
Gerhard von Breuning.
So he was the immediate and obvious choice to oversee the exhumation of Beethoven: It was in many ways a culmination of his two lifelong obsessions. Breuning was the perfect man for this job—a capable doctor who had a passion for music and who had known Beethoven personally.
ASIDE FROM RESCUING the two graves from decay, the committee members all hoped for a chance to get another look at the composers’ remains, particularly Beethoven’s. Wagner and Rokitansky’s work during the original autopsy had left many questions unanswered, and the butchered condition in which they had left the corpse—not to mention the sparse details afforded by the autopsy report—suggested that a more serious, detailed, and reverential examination should take place.
Chief among all the questions that remained unanswered was the problem of Beethoven’s deafness. Wagner had noted “wrinkled” acoustic nerves and “cartilaginous” arteries dilated to “beyond the size of the lumen of a raven’s quill.” But what had caused this condition? Breuning and the others were particularly eager to examine the temporal bones, the small parts of the skull that connect the temples to the ears and would have the most to say about the composer’s auditory canals. But they hoped that the skull would hold other secrets as well, and they were eager to get to it.
THE EXHUMATION BEGAN on October 13, 1863, during a slow, drizzling rain. Schubert’s coffin was unearthed quickly, but the excavation of Beethoven’s grave took over eight hours because workers had to break through the layer of bricks that Stephan von Breuning had placed over the coffin. They were unable to finish that day, and once again an armed guard was posted at Beethoven’s grave until the next morning.
The wood of the coffin itself, they found, had disintegrated into white-yellowish chunks. The remains were likewise not in the greatest shape; bones were missing—some carpal bones from the wrists and tarsal bones from the ankles as well as a few ribs.
Beethoven’s bones were still a light color, but Schubert’s bones were a deep brownish-black as a result of the damp soil and water leakage where he’d been buried. In addition, they noted that around Schubert’s skull was a “rather dense covering of his—as everybody knows—very luxuriant hair,” which unfortunately was now “mixed with a lot of damp soil, half rotten wood shavings, and many hundreds of insect larvae.”134 At the exhumation Schubert’s hair—presumably cleaned of wood shavings and maggots—was presented reverentially to his brother.
The committee also found numerous decayed pieces of clothing, the sole of a shoe, and two pieces of a comb that had been used to hold back the aforementioned “luxurious amount of hair.” The committee’s official exhumation report stated, “All these objects were carefully collected; the members of the administration took individual parts of the remnants of clothing and the wood of the coffin of Beethoven as well as of Schubert,” and while Breuning kept safeguard over most of them, “parts were given over to the few persons present at this serious act who were visibly moved by strong emotions.”135
The hair and clothing were important, to be sure, but, as Breuning later wrote, “the main goal was, of course, the retrieval of the skull.”136 In that age of skull-stealing, all sorts of rumors were circulating about Beethoven’s head. Numerous men on the committee believed that the head would be missing, that someone would have bested Stephan von Breuning and removed the head before it had gone into the coffin. Others assumed it would be there, and the committee had heard another, perhaps more reliable rumor that only part of the skull would be missing.
This last rumor turned out to be true. Beethoven’s skull was found to be in pieces; it had been broken into approximately nine different fragments by Wagner, and in decay they had not held their shape but lay in a pile at the bottom of the coffin. As some had feared, a few important fragments were missing. Specifically, the petrous segments of the temporal bones—the small pyramidshaped pieces of the skull that contain all the organs of hearing— had been removed “by having been sawed off vertically.”137 In other words, when Wagner had segmented the head into numerous pieces he had deliberately cut out the single most crucial part of the skull for understanding Beethoven’s deafness, and now it seemed that he had never returned them to the body. This also helped to explain Beethoven’s poor appearance while he lay in state because Wagner had patched up the missing bones with clay, further distorting the face.
The skull of Ludwig van Beethoven.
REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF THE IRA F. BRILLIANT CENTER FOR BEETHOVEN STUDIES, SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY.
It was a crushing disappointment. For someone looking for the answer to Beethoven’s deafness, the temporal bones were a conspicuous absence. A conclusive diagnosis on the maestro’s hearing loss was now all but impossible.
EVEN WITH THE remains in such sad shape, all present understood that it was a rare opportunity to study the anatomy of the two composers and learn something vital about their lives and their deaths. The original intention had been to rebury the bodies that same day, but now that they were unearthed, there was a discussion as to whether to keep them aboveground. Casts and photographs, to be sure, could tell a lot, but there was something more to the actual skulls, especially Beethoven’s, whose deteriorated condition meant that, as Breuning argued, “important proportions of the skull can only be obtained by comparing repeated measurements of the original skull with its individual parts.”138
The society’s board members agreed with the exhumation committee that, at least for the time being, the skulls need not be immed
iately reburied. Everyone saw the important scientific opportunity afforded by the exhumation and agreed that photographs and casts should be taken of the skulls. In addition, the board had to decide whether to rebury the skulls or house them in “a worthy place that would closely reflect the grand activity of the spirits that lived in these bony dwellings.”139
There was also the problem of the missing temporal bones. “Since two essential components of the skull have never been put into the grave,” the committee noted, “and in case these components would ever be found, they could only be reconnected with the other components of the skull if the latter is properly kept.”140
Among those vociferously arguing that the skulls should be kept unburied was Breuning. The skulls, he maintained, had immense scientific value and could not simply be allowed to rot in the ground. Ultimately, though, the society’s board decided that the skulls would go back into the ground with the rest of the remains. There would be enough time for plaster casts, photographs, and measurements of the heads, and then they were to return to the coffins—with one exception. The only thing they did not ask to be reinterred was “the hair of Franz Schubert, which was found disconnected from the skull and mixed in with parts of soil, and which was given to the brother of the deceased right at the exhumation.”141
The composers’ remains, minus skulls, were laid out in their new zinc coffins—vertebrae were strung together with twine, and the bones were assembled as best could be accomplished. The coffins were closed and soldered shut and affixed with the seal of the society. Then the doctors turned to the skulls.
The photographer J. B. Rottmayer took a number of photographic studies, while the sculptor Alois Wittman was called in to make plaster casts. A dentist was retained to make records of the composers’ teeth. And last was Dr. Romeo Seligmann, who took exacting measurements of the skulls for future scientific research. Known by his friends simply by the nickname “Wonderful” for his brilliance and congeniality, Seligmann had taught himself Arabic and Persian while still a high school student and had become one of the foremost scholars of the history of medicine. In his spare time he worked out a philosophical treatise on the relationship between ancient Indian and Greek medicine, and he was building his own skull collection for his anthropological research. In addition to his medical specimens, he was an avid art collector, and through his friendship with Goethe’s daughter-in-law, Ottilie (who was a patient and lavished gifts on him), he acquired a massive collection of Goethe portraits and mementoes (which became known as his “Goethiana”).
Shepherding the head of Beethoven through the whole process, of course, was Breuning. Indeed, he kept the skull with him at all times; although work on the skulls was done in a secret location, where there had to be at least two people present at all times to prevent tampering or theft, Breuning was allowed to take Beethoven’s home with him each night. He was not a phrenologist by profession, nor was he captivated by the New Science, as Joseph Carl Rosenbaum and Johann Peter had been sixty years earlier. But the fact that phrenology had been largely discredited didn’t mean it hadn’t left its traces on respectable science. As he compared their skulls in the laboratory, Breuning made a pronouncement about the two composers that has since become infamous in classical music studies: He claimed that the skulls “seemed to reflect the characteristics of the composers’ works. The walls of Beethoven’s skull exhibit strong density and thickness, whereas Schubert’s bones show feminine delicateness.”142
Breuning also claimed that the fragmentation of Beethoven’s skull, combined with the dampness of the grave, had caused the bone to warp and that this explained the rather odd shape that the forehead had assumed. Rather than being a high, well-developed forehead, as could be expected of such a genius, it was sloped back and disturbingly low. Warping, due to moisture, seemed the only plausible reason for this.
While the casts were being made, a quick search for the missing temporal bones was also carried out. There had been a published report that a certain unnamed “medical celebrity in Paris” might know their whereabouts and perhaps might even have taken them. But this inquiry came to no avail; the medical celebrity in question replied in a letter, “When I left Vienna, I only had the pleasure to take with me from the Austrian capital the gratitude for my professors and the friendship of my colleagues that I appreciated. I never heard anyone speak about Beethoven’s ears.”143
As for the items of clothing and other fragments, Breuning ordered special zinc cases so that they could be returned to the new coffins without fear of further disintegration.
Despite his work during this time, Breuning was still upset over the board’s decision to reinter the skulls, and he would continue to brood over it in coming years. “How important and how interesting it would be for science,” he wrote twenty years later, “if these skulls remained available for further, more thorough investigation. They should be preserved above the earth and accessible in a museum, art gallery, or library. The two composers would be better honored by such action than by the usual interment of their skulls in tombs.” The board’s decision reeked of a superstition that Breuning found indefensible when compared to scientific inquiry. “Only highly prejudiced people (who are unfortunately in the majority) would be offended” by putting the skulls in the museum, and “any person with scientific training would certainly not object.” Breuning concluded: “I am sure no feelings of piety will be offended if the dry skulls, having long been separated from the rest of the skeletons, should be immortalized in such a way.”144
But Breuning’s attachment to the head of his father’s friend had gone beyond simple scientific inquiry. Each night he returned home with the skull, placing it lovingly beside his bed to meditate on while he drifted off to sleep. “What stormy feelings passed through my mind,” Breuning later said of those days, “evoking such powerful memories, as I had possession of that head for a few days . . . [and] kept it by my bedside overnight, and in general proudly watched over that head from whose mouth, in years gone by, I had so often heard the living word!”145
THE COMPOSERS’ SKULLS, along with the tin boxes containing the other relics, were reunited with the rest of the remains on October 22. Gerhard von Breuning brought Beethoven’s skull fragments, and most likely it was he who reassembled them in the coffin, reconstructing the head of the composer as best he could. It was a solemn, low-key affair, with about twenty people looking on as the coffins were closed and locked; the keys given to Dr. Standthartner; the lids soldered closed; and, finally, seals of the society affixed to the coffins.
The next morning both coffins were interred in newly constructed vaults. The audience for the ceremony was a good deal larger; the chapel was big enough to fit only the doctors and immediate family, while other spectators were obliged to wait outside. After a requiem mass, the coffins were carried to the vault, with Breuning among the Schubert pallbearers and Standthartner among the Beethoven pallbearers.
A blessing and another song were offered, and then the deputy head of the society delivered a homily. He spoke of the way emotions always attach themselves “with heartfelt love” to the remains of the dead, “as to a lock of a friend, as to the letter of a beloved person,” even though “cold reason might smile.” He said that even though one could honor the dead composers with monuments or by playing their work, “we still like to make a pilgrimage to the places where the earthly part of their being that has been shed rests.”146 After he had finished, the new coffins were sealed in the vault and the crowd dispersed.
But, as these things go, not all of Beethoven had made it back into the vault.
WHAT WAS LEFT of Beethoven remained undisturbed for another quarter of a century, until 1888, when the body was once again exhumed. This time the reason was that the Währing cemetery was in near disintegration and was to be demolished to make way for new buildings. Along with the other coffins to be moved, Beethoven’s remains were to be transferred to the “Grove of Honor” of the central cemetery in Vienna.
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When Gerhard von Breuning heard the news, he wrote an essay on the skulls of Beethoven and Schubert in which he lamented the dispersal of the cemetery’s occupants. “Along with the cemetery’s demise, we will likewise have to bury many historical memories that link us to the times and conditions of their lives.” He recalled the various composers and friends who had desired to be buried close to Beethoven: Stephan, his father, who had wanted to be buried next to his friend and had been laid to rest “a few graves further down”; Clementi and Ritter von Seyfried, buried on either side of the composer; the playwright Johann Nepomuk Nestroy and the poet Franz Grillparzer; and Schubert, whose “longing to be close to Beethoven, often expressed in his feverish dreams, was fulfilled when he was buried only a few graves up from Beethoven.”147
Breuning saw the cemetery as a delicate network of old friends and colleagues whose lives had intersected in startling and momentous ways and who now continued their conversations in the grave. A whole history could be unraveled by tracing the connections in the Währing cemetery: “All these memories and reference points connecting us with the past,” he wrote, “are now being destroyed and will be forgotten as these ‘famous’ and ‘outstanding’ deceased people will be transferred to other cemeteries.”148
It’s odd that a rationalist like Breuning should care about this so much. He was clearly of two minds: He wanted Beethoven’s remains transparently available for science for all time; he even complained that the photos taken in 1863 had not been made publicly available. But it was hard for him to maintain scientific objectivity, hard not to see the beauty in a cemetery of old friends lying beside each other, hard not to see the mystery in the skull of a friend by one’s bedside, the living word now silent.
As with the 1863 exhumation, when Beethoven was moved in 1888 medical experts were allowed access to the composer, but this time only for a mere twenty minutes—they later complained that the circumstances surrounding this examination “were highly unfavorable.” Still, they had enough time to find that the plaster casts were accurate enough to be used for future study and that there could be “no real objection to the authenticity of the skull fragments found in the coffin.”149
