Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch

Abigail Fine

The first granular study of nineteenth-century composer devotiona network of devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics, rituals, pilgrimage, exhumation, and embalming.

During the nineteenth century, music institutions promoted artworks they deemed timeless and made composers into figureheads of a lasting Western canon. Alongside this institutional face of the canon was a more intimate impulse to preserve, touch, and embrace the residues of the dead. In Germany and Austria between 1870 and 1930, music lovers venerated the bodies, houses, and belongings of composers as relics, shrines, and talismans. InThe Composer Embalmed, Abigail Fine documents the vernacular and eccentric ways that composers have been remembered.

Fine navigates a wealth of unknown archival material to recover the stories of devotees: from pilgrims who felt time stop in historic houses to music-loving doctors who made skulls into sacred specimens, dilettantes who displayed Beethovens mask as a relic of the beautiful death, and interwar critics of those dilettantes who disparaged piety as a false religion, a kitsch replica. In isolation, these practices may look like simple acts of affection.But in the aggregate, Fine asserts, acts of devotion constituted what we might broadly understand as relic culturea culture that sought to possess the body of the departed genius, and that superimposed habits of anthropological collecting onto artifacts of Austro-German heritage. By excavating objects, ephemera, amateur lyric, visitors books, letters, and travelogues,The Composer Embalmedreveals the underbelly of the canon, where guilty pleasures blur the boundary between sanctity and desecration.