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

by Tim Rayborn

  The Syphilis Scourge

  A pox on your houses!

  The life of the musician: adoring and screaming fans, groupies galore, and crowds of young teenage girls desperately mobbing the star for a piece of autographed sheet music or piano strings. Yes, this really happened.

  All very enticing, no doubt, but the problem was that in the nineteenth century (and earlier)—before the advent of antibiotics and penicillin, before latex shields offered their protection to the adventurous—there were great risks in such carousals. The number of artistic types that contracted some form of VD is extensive and includes a sampling of well-known and loved composers who succumbed to the dreadful effects of syphilis at some point in their lives.

  The remarkably gifted and prolific young Franz Schubert (1797–1828) is often labeled as the last of the great composers of the Classical Era and a harbinger of the Romantic. In his short life, he wrote an astonishing number of songs (in excess of six hundred) as well as orchestral music.

  Despite being something of a musical icon, he seems to have had romantic difficulties and to have enjoyed the company of ladies-for-hire. Others at the time suggested that, given his seeming preference for male company, he may have been homosexual in a city that was relatively tolerant of it—Vienna. In any case, he may have contracted syphilis as a young man, as his later health problems seem to indicate that he suffered from it. Treatment for the affliction in those days mainly involved taking doses of mercury. Lovely. The result of this approach was often death by mercury poisoning before syphilis took its toll. Indeed, some of Schubert’s final symptoms are characteristic of such poisoning. Like Purcell and Mozart, he left this world at far too young an age, and again we have to wonder what he might have accomplished had he lived for another thirty years.

  Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (1797–1848) was a noted composer of operas, along with his contemporaries Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini. These three set the stage, so to speak, for the later Italian masters such as Verdi and Puccini. Donizetti’s personal life was marred by tragedy: two children died at birth, another survived for only eleven days; in 1837, within a year of both of his parents dying, his wife also died after giving birth to a stillborn child. She may have contracted a syphilitic infection from her husband that caused complications. He moved to Paris the following year and enjoyed success despite his personal losses. At the height of his career in the early 1840s, he began to exhibit signs of syphilis and may have also suffered from bipolar disorder. By 1846, he was committed to an asylum in Paris, the only place where such unfortunate individuals could be sent in those days. He was eventually sent back to his hometown of Bergamo in Italy, where he died in 1848, insane.

  Robert Schumann (1810–1856) was one of the great composers of the first half of the nineteenth century, and he embodied the new Romantic style in his works and in his life. He was known to be very moody, frequently falling into depression before becoming euphoric, a sign of bipolar disorder. To make matters worse, he contracted syphilis at the age of twenty-one. Despite his various conditions (or perhaps because of them), he produced numerous songs and song cycles, a large quantity of piano music, and many other important works.

  In the 1840s, probably as a result of his worsening illnesses—both mental and physical—he reported that he began to hear a continuous “A” note sounding in his ears. By the early 1850s, this note was joined by voices and what he described as angelic music. In time, the voices became demonic, and he began to hear messages from the dead, either from Schubert or Mendelssohn, who dictated a musical theme to him. In reality, this theme was one that he had composed and used in previous works.

  By 1854, he attempted to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge over the Rhine. He was rescued and taken to an asylum at his own request, where he was to remain with worsening symptoms until his death in July 1856. There is evidence that he may have been suffering from mercury poisoning treatments, which only made any other existing conditions that much worse. An autopsy from the time indicates that he may have also had some kind of brain tumor, as if things weren’t already bad enough.

  His wife, Clara, survived him by forty years and was later the object of love and affection from Johannes Brahms, whose career she had helped when he was young. Schumann’s Violin Concerto was to remain unknown to the world for decades after his death, until it was recovered in a most unusual way, as we shall see in Part II.

  Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)

  The devil made him do it II, or why does the devil get all the good tunes?

  You have to hand it to violinists. They seem to have been the rock guitarists of their time, bold, flashy, and talented. Everyone wanted to see what a skilled composer or musician could do on the instrument, especially if they were just a little too good to be true, as in the case of Paganini. Then, the rumors could start flying about supernatural assistance from the Prince of Darkness.

  Paganini was perhaps the greatest violinist in Western music history. His works for the instrument are so demanding and difficult to play that even today violinists consider it a peak of achievement to master his compositions. In his own time, such exceptional talent not only drew admiration, but also aroused suspicion as to just how a mortal man could be so gifted. It seems a strange thing that when looking for the source of genius, many often detect the whiff of brimstone rather than the halo of the angelic.

  As Paganini’s fame spread, so did the rumors. He began to be known in some circles as a Hexensohn, or “witch’s brat.” It was whispered that his abilities came from having sold his soul to Satan in exchange for almost magical musical powers.

  Paganini did nothing to discourage these rumors, figuring, like today’s heavy metal bands that use satanic imagery, that there was no such thing as bad publicity. He dressed in black, wore his hair long, and sometimes arrived to performances in a black coach pulled by four black horses. He was tall and thin, emaciated even, and by 1828, he had lost his teeth. Doctors assumed that his various illnesses were due to syphilis (again!) and prescribed mercury treatments, which loosened Paganini’s teeth to such an extent that they eventually had to be pulled. This only added to his gaunt and ghoulish appearance. Alice Cooper, King Diamond, and Marilyn Manson are latecomers compared to this guy.

  Yes, Niccolò knew all about PR and how to work an audience. Indeed, audience members would remark how they had never heard nor seen anything like him, and as a result, people flocked to see this mystery man and hear his astonishing talent.

  In looking for less supernatural explanations for his skill, several medical conditions have been suggested. Among them is Ehlers-Danlos, a genetic disorder causing much greater mobility in the joints due to a collagen synthesis defect. If he did have this condition, it would have allowed his finger joints to be extremely flexible. It was said that he could play three octaves across the violin’s fretboard without shifting his hand position. He was also described as having very long arms, legs, and fingers. This might have been due to a condition known as Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue.

  If he did make a diabolical pact, the devil came to collect his part of the bargain in 1840. Paganini was dying of cancer of the larynx, though other accounts say that he died of an internal hemorrhage. He apparently refused to see the bishop when he came to visit, insisting that he was not dying and did not need last rites. Maybe he was just trying to keep up his image.

  In any case, the Church took the whole thing so seriously that it refused to let him be buried in consecrated ground. It took some five years for his family to be able to persuade the pope to move his body to a hallowed resting place, but his remains were not interred until 1876 in Parma. Maybe in some warm place, Niccolò and Old Nick are fiddling together even now.

  Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)

  Throwing his voice

  A leading figure in the early German Romantic movement, Weber was known for his clarinet works and operas. As a result of his early promise, he was appointed Kapellmeiste
r (“chapel master”) in Breslau in 1804, at the age of only seventeen. This appointment naturally led to some resentment among his older colleagues.

  As a youth, he was gifted with a beautiful singing voice, but he was destined for a cruel fate. One evening, he casually drank from a wine bottle. What he didn’t know was that his father was using the bottle to store an engraving acid used in lithography. The effects of such a substance on the body don’t bear thinking about. It nearly killed him, and he took two months to recover. The ultimate result was that his voice was ruined, and he could no longer sing.

  In spite of this, he pressed on as a composer. Although he created many acclaimed works, he also made enemies through his ambition and racked up debts for his rather lavish lifestyle. Alas, he was destined for another cruel fate, dying of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-nine.

  Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)

  Sex, drugs, and black masses

  Berlioz’s odd life and artistic creations could merit a chapter all of their own. He is most remembered for his Symphonie fantastique, which by his own admission depicted visions of an opium trip. It was probably inspired in part by Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; now there’s a tabloid title! Whether or not the Symphonie is intended to be autobiographical is unclear, but there are obvious references to events in Berlioz’s own life, fueling suspicion that he created the work under the influence of the drug, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge did in writing his poem “Kubla Khan.”

  The symphony describes a lovesick young artist’s haunted dreams about an unattainable woman. The work follows his journey in seeking refuge for his pain, first in religious belief, and then by escaping into the countryside. Writing to his friend Humbert Ferrand, Berlioz described the macabre story that unfolds:

  In a fit of despair he [the lover] poisons himself with opium; but instead of killing him, the narcotic induces a horrific vision, in which he believes he has murdered the loved one, has been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution. March to the scaffold; immense procession of headsmen, soldiers and populace. At the end the melody reappears once again, like a last reminder of love, interrupted by the death stroke.

  The next moment he is surrounded by a hideous throng of demons and sorcerers, gathered to celebrate Sabbath night…. At last the melody arrives. Till then it had appeared only in a graceful guise, but now it has become a vulgar tavern tune, trivial and base; the beloved object has come to the sabbath to take part in her victim’s funeral. She is nothing but a courtesan, fit to figure in the orgy. The ceremony begins; the bells toll, the whole hellish cohort prostrates itself; a chorus chants the plainsong sequence of the dead [the Dies irae], two other choruses repeat it in a burlesque parody. Finally, the sabbath round-dance whirls. At its violent climax it mingles with the Dies irae, and the vision ends.

  This was wild stuff to be sure, and it must have been very shocking when it was first performed. Reaction was mixed. Mendelssohn was disgusted by the themes and called the piece “utterly loathsome,” while the young Franz Liszt hailed it as a work of genius.

  It seems that it was partly autobiographical, for Berlioz himself was smitten with an Irish Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, whom he had seen perform in a Paris production of Hamlet. Despite his attempts to gain her attention and favor, she spurned him as a young upstart, refusing to meet him. Apparently in response to this rejection, he composed the Symphonie, which was his first major work. He may have written the shocking finale at least partially because of rumors that the actress was having an affair with her manager, and thus Berlioz, in his anger and frustration, damned her to hell symbolically.

  The story doesn’t end there. In 1830 he met Camille Mokke, a young lady who seemed determined to win him over just to prove that she could. She succeeded, and the two were engaged. Around the same time, Berlioz won a prestigious award, the Prix de Rome. In December 1831, he left France and journeyed to Rome, required to spend the next two years in the city by a clause in the Prix. Not a bad deal, really!

  However, during his time there he received an unhappy, and perhaps even cowardly, letter from Camille’s mother informing him that she was calling off their engagement. The young lady would instead marry a man confusingly also named Camille (which must have made for very interesting wedding invitations), one Camille Pleyel, a wealthy manufacturer of pianos. Spurned again, Berlioz was furious. In a fit of rage he began plotting the murders of not only his ex-fiancée, but of her mother and Mr. Pleyel as well.

  He set about planning everything in detail, including purchasing women’s clothes—a dress, wig, hat, veils, and so on—as a disguise to gain entry into their home. He stole a set of pistols with which to carry out the murders and ensured that there was enough ammunition for him to kill himself afterward. Since sometimes such guns would jam, he also purchased laudanum and strychnine, to make sure that he could finish himself off.

  Everything was set for a grand plot that could have gone down in the annals of music history as a crime equal to Gesualdo’s. He was ready to return to Paris; it was all in place, except for a small problem. After he reached Genoa, he realized that he had left his drag disguise in the carriage. First he tried to find replacement clothes; then one afternoon he decided to end it all by jumping off a cliff into the sea, a bold and dramatic act that would make a statement and epitomize the Romantic ethos—except that he landed in the water near a fishing boat and was promptly rescued. Nevertheless, he vowed to carry out his plan and continued his journey, ending up in Nice. By this time, he was having serious doubts and eventually abandoned the entire plan. He had decided that it was foolish, that Camille was a child, her mother was odious, and that they were not worth his time. He still had music to compose and didn’t want to be remembered by posterity as a monster. Well, all right, then.

  Back in Italy, he wrote Lélio, a piece inspired by his determination to get over Camille and reclaim his life. The work consists of symphonic music with narration. It is a sequel to the Symphonie, an awakening from the nightmare, with Camille symbolically offering a way out of the nightmarish dream of the earlier piece, though it also references Smithson.

  When he eventually returned to Paris and rented rooms, Berlioz discovered that Smithson was in the city. Convinced that fate was guiding him, he tried once again to contact her and had a third party invite her to a concert that featured Lélio. This time, Smithson consented. When she heard the performance, she realized that she had been a great inspiration to him. She met Berlioz, and amazingly, they ultimately married in 1833 despite language barriers and family opposition. There was no happy ending, however, for he soon realized that the reality could not match the ideal he had created in his mind.

  Eight years later, the magic had worn off completely, and Berlioz had a new mistress, Marie Recio. His wife didn’t approve, naturally, and took to drinking; they separated two years later, in 1844. Ten years after that, poor dejected Smithson died of a stroke (or rather, several), and Berlioz finally married Recio. In 1862, Recio herself died of a heart attack, and Berlioz consoled himself by falling in love with a young woman named Amélie; this story just keeps on going. She died in 1864 after breaking off their relationship, and he would soon lament that he had no more hope; all he had left was contempt for humanity and its cruelty. He wondered why Death would not take him away.

  In 1864, Smithson’s remains had to be disinterred from Montmartre cemetery to make room for a new street; Berlioz was present for the disinterment. He died in 1869, lonely, unfulfilled, and broken.

  Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)

  I left my heart in … Warsaw?

  A moody and temperamental man who lived a life of artistry and drama and died young from tuberculosis, Chopin embodied the ideals of the Romantic age—well, maybe the TB wasn’t so ideal. His virtuoso piano music helped to establish the instrument as a perpetual favorite of the nineteenth century. He traveled widely and entertained a series of lovers, the most famous being the autho
r Aurore Dudevant, better known by her pen name George Sand.

  In an attitude befitting one of these stormy times, Chopin had a morbid fear of being buried alive. So much so that he left strict instructions for his heart to be cut out upon his death as an insurance policy against his reviving and finding himself in a tight situation six feet under.

  After his death, his sister carried out his wish. She placed his heart in an urn that was delivered back to Warsaw. There, it was sealed in a pillar in the Holy Cross Church on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Beneath the heart is a grimly amusing inscription from the Bible, Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” His heart is still there, even though the church was nearly destroyed in World War II and had to be completely rebuilt. The rest of his body is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

  On his deathbed, Chopin showed a bit of humor. In his last request, he stated, “You will play in memory of me and I will hear you from beyond … play really good music, Mozart, for instance.”

  Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

  Bring back my body for me

  Liszt’s reputation as one of the supreme pianists of the nineteenth century is quite secure. He wrote an astonishing amount of virtuoso piano music. As a young man, he was loved like a pop star, with young women swooning in his presence. It was said that his adoring fans collected broken strings from the pianos he played and had them made into bracelets. Ladies even collected his used cigar butts and wore them in their cleavage. Seriously. He happily availed himself of such attentions (and seems to have escaped the syphilis curse), but by later life, he had taken minor orders in the Catholic Church and lived out his days as a priest.

  Liszt’s life was long and complex, but it is the macabre circumstances surrounding his death that are so interesting. He had remained in remarkably good health throughout his life until a fall down some stairs in 1881. After this accident, he began to be plagued by a number of ailments, including heart problems that finally led to his death, though the official cause was listed as pneumonia. One theory is that shortly before he died he was given two injections near the heart. It was a practice to give such shallow injections of camphor to warm an area of the body, following this with a massage. However, if the camphor was accidentally injected into a frail heart, it could induce a heart attack. In any case, Liszt died shortly afterward.