by Colin Dickey
The 1863 exhumation had already revealed the strange way in which, over time, underground, bones simply disappear. Decay, bacteria, any number of factors can cause even something as hard as bone to disintegrate. So the 1888 doctors, pressed for time, noted only in passing that a portion of the occipital bone was missing, as was a portion of the left parietal bone. These pieces were substantially larger than the petrous bones taken by Wagner—the occipital bone forms the broad back shelf of the head, and the parietal bones each form half of the roof of the cranial cavity. The missing pieces, each about four inches long, seemed too big to have simply disintegrated, especially considering that the express purpose of the 1863 reburial had been to keep the remains in better condition. The committee continued its cataloging of the bones of the skull, then moved on to its conclusions. Curiously, the members seem to have not found it noteworthy that more of the skull was missing than had been in 1863. Each autopsy, it seemed, led to more bits of Beethoven’s head disappearing; perhaps this was just the way of the world.
As in 1863, a speech was given at the 1888 reburial, written by Joseph Weilen and delivered by the actor Joseph Lewinsky. In his praise of Beethoven, Weilen noted that the composer was to be buried next to the cenotaph of Mozart, “whose grave covers not his bones but the shameful reproach for his contemporaries who, having received his masterpieces, lacked due regard for preserving his ashes.” He then quoted Grillparzer, whose body was also about to be transferred out of the Währing cemetery:
You who have gathered at this place, step closer to this grave . . . the one who lies here was inspired. Striving for one thing, caring for one thing, suffering for one thing, offering everything for one thing, this is how this man walked through life. . . . If there is still any sense of wholeness in us in this broken time, let us gather together at his grave. This is why there have always been poets, and heroes, singers, and those inspired by God—so that through them poor ruined human beings raise themselves up, ponder their origin and their destination.150
IT’S NOT CLEAR whether either Gerhard von Breuning or Romeo Seligmann was present for this second exhumation. It’s not clear whether, if they had been, they would have shared what they knew about the newly discovered missing portions of Beethoven’s skull, the occipital fragments. As he saw his own death impending, Beethoven had bitterly remarked to Dr. Wawruch that if anyone could save him from the oblivion of death “his name would be Wonderful!” He had been referring to the Messiah, but in a curious way his prophecy would yet come true: in 1863 persons unknown had kept out a few precious fragments of the composer’s skull—to save them from the oblivion of decay and disintegration—and given them to Dr. Romeo Seligmann, known to his friends simply as “Wonderful.”
CHAPTER TEN
FRAGMENTS OF A MYSTERY
Mysteries surround Beethoven’s death; perhaps they always will.
With the temporal bones lost, an accurate diagnosis of his deafness may never be made, and even a recent DNA analysis of his hair has raised at least as many questions as it has answered. His ailments may have been caused by lead poisoning, or perhaps by a treatment of mercury for syphilis or some other problem, but in all likelihood the answer will never be known. And then there is the question of the skull fragments, the second set to be removed, extracted, in 1863 during the first exhumation and noted only in the second exhumation. Who gave them to Romeo Seligmann?
Dr. William Meredith, who runs the Ira F. Brilliant Center of Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University has pointed to Gerhard von Breuning. Gerhard had the motive, being perhaps the most vocal proponent of keeping Beethoven’s head in a museum rather than having it go back into the ground. And he had the means, since of all those present he was the only one ever to be left alone with the skull. The missing fragments were from the back of the skull and thus would not have been missed when Breuning arranged the fragments face up in the casket for reburial. And the fragments were kept—it would later be discovered—in specially made zinc boxes, the same kind as the ones Breuning ordered for the clothing and other nonhuman remains.
Meredith offered another plausible explanation. “Perhaps Breuning did not lose the argument on October 15, 1863,” he suggested, “about the reburial of the skulls. Of all the people involved in the exhumation, he held a unique position, having been Beethoven’s friend as a teenager. His word and moral authority in this regard must have carried special weight. Perhaps the Committee agreed to an undocumented compromise. Perhaps Breuning himself was allowed to keep the two large fragments, but the matter was not to be made public.”151
It may be that the act was on someone else’s initiative, but if so, Breuning must at least have been complicit. The same man who watched his father go to such lengths to safeguard the composer and his legacy that it literally killed him, who would later lament the lost memories and reference points from the past as the Währing cemetery was plowed under and the remains of these great men were separated—this same man had a hand in one way or another in the further fragmentation of Beethoven’s remains.
BREUNING SEEMS TO us now a figure who straddles multiple epochs. He received his medical training at a time when the field of medicine was changing and beginning to assume the shape it has today. Centuries-old practices such as blood-letting were falling out of favor, and others were taking their place. In 1847 Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss—working in the same hospital in Vienna where Haydn’s head had been cleaned in 1809—discovered pathogenic germs after he discovered that doctors attending births directly after performing autopsies were transmitting puerperal fever to their patients. In such a changing medical environment phrenology had little place, but its prevalence as a social phenomenon meant that it continued to influence men like Breuning, who could still claim that thickness of skull could determine the relative “masculinity” or “femininity” of a composer’s musical works. With knowledge in this state of flux, men like Breuning were more than capable of seeing in Beethoven’s skull both a pathological map and a phrenological map.
Living as he did at a time when phrenology was evolving from a serious scientific pursuit into a disgraceful joke, Breuning also marks the end of another kind of legacy. What seems so shocking about Rosenbaum’s theft of Haydn’s head is in part the fact that he had known the man in life and that he was capable of seeing the grave robbery as an act of veneration and respect. Breuning, similarly, had known Beethoven, and in both men’s cases this kind of cranial trophy-hunting was an extremely intimate affair. There was nothing ghoulish about it to them; to keep the remains of a loved one in a glass box on a library shelf, or in a zinc box in a drawer, was to them an act that spoke of deep mystery and friendship.
This concept, too, was changing. Until the mid—nineteenth century, it was common for a family to keep the body of a loved one in the house for days, laid out on a table or a bed, as if the corpse’s occupant had not yet left them. There was a familiarity to the dead in those days. But in the coming decades burial reformers—spurred in no small part by Semmelweiss’s discovery of the corpse’s pathogenic possibilities—led a concentrated campaign to remove the dead body more quickly from the sphere of the living and into mortuaries and cemeteries. With our own familiar connection to the dead severed, Rosenbaum’s and Breuning’s actions may strike us as macabre, but there’s no reason to think they would have seen them that way.
Still, others did see their actions as deeply troubling. By the time the term “skulduggery” came into use in 1867 to mean underhandedness and deceit, grave robbing and head-stealing were a fact of life, one more disturbing element of the modern age.
THE 1827 AUTOPSY of Beethoven was hardly an auspicious beginning for Carl von Rokitansky. It was the first autopsy he had attended, and it was nothing short of a disgrace. Wagner was in charge and Rokitansky merely the apprentice, so it’s hard to lay any blame on him. Still, it hardly boded well for the young anatomist. Yet, surprisingly, he would go on to pursue one of the most distinguished careers in Viennese medicine.<
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Rokitansky, a lower-middle-class son of a local District Office clerk, was largely self-taught, chafing under a medical education system that relied on rote memorization through textbooks. While studying under Wagner, he learned a great deal about dissection, but he quickly saw the limitations of his teacher, who could never get beyond the received philosophical theories of the day to see what actually lay before him on the operating table.
In 1833 Rokitansky was appointed prosector for the Vienna General Hospital and worked on literally tens of thousands of corpses in the ensuing years. Unlike similar institutions in other major cities, the Vienna General Hospital acted as a clearinghouse for the whole city, so Rokitansky saw far more bodies than his counterparts in Berlin or Paris. The autopsy of Beethoven was only the first of 59,786 that Rokitansky would perform during his spectacular career.
In this unique position, Rokitansky (by virtue of the sheer volume of bodies at his disposal) saw things no one else had noticed before. His dissections and lectures changed much about the way we see the body, and his teachings ushered in a renaissance of medical knowledge that would come be known as the Second Vienna Medical School and that was, as one historian recently put it, “centered on the mortuary of the Vienna General Hospital, around Carl von Rokitansky’s autopsy table.”152
Whatever legacy Gall and Spurzheim had bequeathed to Wagner’s generation, Rokitansky was singularly influential in demolishing it. Through his insights into the corpse and its pathologies, he opened the study of anatomy to a new generation of gifted doctors ready to be freed of the shackles of superstition and philosophy and to understand what lay before them. Foreign doctors and scholars came from all over to learn from Rokitansky, and by the 1860s nearly every leading clinician and pathologist could say that he had been a student of Rokitansky’s at one point or another.
One such illustrious student was the physician Karl Haller, who had studied with Rokitansky in Vienna before setting up his own practice. In 1852 he paid his old teacher a visit, bearing with him two strange gifts that he had received from a patient some number of years back—a certain Johann Nepomuk Peter, who had given the objects to Haller for safekeeping as he was approaching death. That had been in 1839, and now, thirteen years later, Haller could think of no better place for these bizarre specimens than the collection of the “Father of Morbid Anatomy,” as Rokitansky had come to be known.
Rokitansky received them graciously and unwrapped the two parcels, revealing two human skulls. One, Haller explained, had belonged to a little-known and long-forgotten actress, Elizabeth Roose.
The other had belonged to Joseph Haydn.
PART THREE
THE FATE OF HIS BONES
I hear the skull, at every spurt,
Beg his friend:
“When is this brutal, ridiculous sport
Going to end?
That stuff that from your mouth you scatter
In the air like rain,
You blind murderer, is the matter
Of my blood and brain!”
· Charles Baudelaire, “Love and the Skull”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A CITY OF CORPSES
Ever since Gerhard von Breuning had discovered that Beethoven’s temporal bones were missing, he had kept his eye out for them. About ten years after the 1863 exhumation, a man named Joseph Hyrtl, himself one of the greatest anatomists of his age, told Breuning he had seen the missing hearing organs many years earlier, sealed in a glass vessel in the possession of Vienna’s coroner Anton Dotter. How Dotter had come by them, or what had happened to them since, Hyrtl couldn’t say, and Breuning’s attempts to track them down were ultimately fruitless. But Joseph Hyrtl had something else to show Breuning, perhaps equally interesting: the skull of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Since Joseph Rothmayer had been seized by an “animated musical enthusiasm” and plucked the skull out of its third-class grave in 1793, it had changed hands a few times. It was given first to Joseph Radschopf, Rothmayer’s successor as sexton of St. Marx, who in turn gave Mozart’s head to Jakob Hyrtl in 1842. Jakob was a copper engraver and amateur musician, and on his death in 1868 the skull fell to his brother, Joseph, who, of the two Hyrtls, was clearly the one for whom the skull was destined.
Like Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, Joseph Hyrtl had been born in Eisenstadt and had come to Vienna to make his name. Jakob and Joseph’s father had been a member of the prince’s celebrated orchestra, and like Rosenbaum they had grown up surrounded by music—when Joseph had begun his education, he had put himself through high school by earning money as a choir boy. Like Rokitansky, Joseph Hyrtl had learned under the system of rote memorization of the First Vienna School. It was a miserable, stifling system of education designed to discourage individuality and creative thinking. One teacher in particular Hyrtl would later describe as a “man who idled away 30 years of his lazy life in the desecrated chair of anatomy. As a teacher he made no intellectual bequest to any of his students, among whom I should consider myself one, and his sole function seems to have been to fill the lecture-hall with the size of his belly.”153
Hyrtl found his calling in the study of comparative anatomy. He began collecting all manner of different animal species, requesting specimens from various Austrian consulates as far away as Beirut and Havana. While George Combe saw phrenology as the key to the manifold mysteries of the universe and the roadmap to God’s divine plan, Hyrtl sought the same revelations in comparative anatomy, whose purpose was “to establish out of the wealth of facts, and the bare treasures of sporadic experiences . . . the inherent linkage with the unity and universality of the life of Nature.” Comparative anatomy was, he claimed, a “philosophical science” in which one could determine “how the same idea of life can manifest itself in the most varied shapes, how the plan and the laws of its structure and functions marked every individual as being relatively perfect, i.e., possessing the highest expediency for his existence.”154 Hyrtl’s interest in comparative anatomy, then, went beyond simply lining up the arteries of different animals and looking for differences—it was instead a final flowering of a certain Romantic spirit in an increasingly modern age.
Hyrtl married this passion for the manifold objects of the natural world to a technical brilliance that kept him relevant in the changing landscape of medicine, specifically with scientific preservations, a practice with a long heritage. Frederick Ruysch had been the first to experiment with injecting resins and wax into arteries and veins in the late seventeenth century as a means of preserving specimens. Ruysch, though, was an artist as much as an anatomist, and his mummies were arranged more for aesthetic impact than for scientific taxonomy. It was Joseph Hyrtl who elevated this “Ruyschian art” to a science, unleashing a new “despotism of injections” in his bedroom as a student. The process Hyrtl perfected was known as corrosive anatomy: One identifies the part of the body to be preserved and injects its blood vessels with wax or another preservative. Then the surrounding tissues are corroded away so that a specific tissue or capillary structure can be revealed. Hyrtl became so well known for his preparations that museums from Rio de Janeiro to Stockholm enlisted his services; soon Hyrtl preparations were to be found in museums the world over.
In his cramped, poorly lit rooms at the University of Prague (where he had been made professor at twenty-six), Hyrtl began to build one of the most elaborate collections of anatomical specimens and preparations in the world. It was here that he began giving lectures on anatomy in the back room and established his reputation as a first-rate polymath and teacher, a reputation cemented with the publication of his Handbook of Topographic Anatomy, the first applied-anatomy textbook. The book was an instant success, translated into dozens of languages and reaching twenty editions in a few years. It catapulted Hyrtl to medical stardom.
While Hyrtl perfected corrosive preservations, Rokitansky continued to perfect dissection, and under the two of them, Vienna changed from a city of music to a city of corpses. While countries like Britain and Ame
rica struggled to come up with viable laws to permit dissection, Vienna could boast that it provided over two thousand corpses a year to its anatomists and pathologists. As far back as Emperor Joseph II in the previous century, the Hapsburg Empire had developed a more permissive attitude toward dissection, though Joseph II’s burial reforms had stalled during the Napoleonic Wars. Now they leaped forward once again—in the massive General Hospital where Rokitansky worked, unclaimed bodies were turned over to the anatomists as fair repayment for free treatment in the hospital. In the years between 1851 and 1854, the Vienna General Hospital disgorged 11,458 bodies to waiting doctors.
In Vienna you could buy a corpse for 1.5 guldens, a fraction of what Rosenbaum had paid to bribe the grave digger for Haydn’s head. Corpses for dissection were known as “study corpses,” “free-of-charge corpses,” “failed corpses,” and “Arimathaea corpses” (so named for the St. Joseph of Arimathaea Society, a benevolent organization devoted to burying the destitute).155 In such a climate corpses were plentiful, but no one had it easier than Rokitansky himself. As the city’s star pathologist and something of a national treasure, Rokitansky had been given secret access to literally any body in Vienna. If he needed a particular corpse, he would simply notify the chief municipal public health officer, who would in turn instruct the appropriate grave digger to bury the body in a shallow grave so it could be easily dug up by one of Rokitansky’s assistants later that night. In order to keep the deceased’s family from protesting, the grave diggers were sworn to secrecy, and so, in this city of the dead, Carl von Rokitansky claimed dominion over all.156
