Cranioklepty (15 page)

They were among the lucky ones, but it was clear that a new era of relic theft had begun, one to which Browne himself could
have related. “The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth,” he wrote at the end of
Urn Burial
. “Mummy is become merchandise, Misraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for basalms.”
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No longer just the Egyptian mummies of antiquity, now the great minds of Europe had also become merchandise.

The same year that Skull George absconded with Sir Thomas Browne's head, Anton Schindler published his infamous biography of Beethoven. Schindler was careful to put in a note for his phrenological audience, including the autopsy's description of the numerous convolutions of the brain and the thick skull, since “it would not be uninteresting to many admirers of Beethoven to learn the conformation of his skull.”
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Certainly Beethoven was one of those figures whose genius was not only legendary but highly specific, and no doubt a thorough study of his skull could afford much insight to the phrenologically inclined. As it happened, in 1863 they got their chance.

While Stephan von Breuning's attempts to keep thieves away from Beethoven's grave had worked, he couldn't keep out nature, and by 1863 Beethoven's grave was in disrepair. That year the
Gessellschaft der Musikfreunde—the Society for the Friends of Music—decided to exhume and rebury two bodies to “save the earthly remains of Beethoven and Schubert from further decay and, at the same time, to establish their resting places in a deserving manner.”
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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.
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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.

A
SIDE 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.

T
HE 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

E
VEN 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.”
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The society's board members agreed with the exhumation committee that, at least for the time being, the skulls need not be immediately 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.