The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch

Fine (musicology, Univ. of Oregon) focuses on the esteem in middle-class, consumerist Germany and Austria between 1870 and 1930 for buried bodies, abodes, and tokens of 18th- and 19th-century musical composers. Among the more famous surveyed are Haydn, Schubert, Wagner, Liszt, and Bruckner. Reverence for them sometimes bordered on the ridiculous when mementos were mass-produced knick-knacks or kitsch, imparting a frivolous facade of culture, which some critics cite as inauthentic emblems of self-cultivation. Some self-promoting artists, namely Liszt and Wagner, encouraged competitive collecting. Kunstreligion, or the belief that art manifests the divine, is a predecessor to celebrity culture and served as a temporary assimilationist tool for both men and women to bridge central European religious and regional divisions. Fine spends considerable time on rival claims for legacies on the homes of Mozart and Beethoven, phrenologists’ pseudoscientific study of skulls for the source of genius, and the connection between practitioners of music and medicine.