Abigail Fine, assistant professor of musicology at the University of Oregon, presents a guest scholar lecture, "Preservation Mania: Composers, Relics, and the 'Beautiful Death.'”
Abstract: Preservation Mania: Composers, Relics, and the “Beautiful Death”
A telling neologism appeared in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria: Denkmalwut, or “monument-mania,” a critique of the many statues, editions, and museums that made long-dead artists last. The period’s festivals, monuments, and choral odes are well-known to musicology (Rehding 2009; Minor 2012), but the impulse to preserve far exceeds the familiar stuff of civic history. When German and Austrian music-lovers enchanted composers’ bodies, houses, and objects as incorruptible relics, shrines, and talismans, they enacted a relic culture that was both affectionate and destructive. With the exhumation, embalming, and display of composers came a heightened awareness of art music’s zombie culture, its “beautiful dead” (Ariès 1974) laid out in funerary rituals or wandering the modern city as curious anachronisms in literary fiction and satire.
This talk examines how devotees to Austro-German composers preserved bodily traces in ways that teetered between piety and desecration, and that folded habits of colonial hoarding back onto Europe’s own “high culture.” In part one, I show how music-loving doctors of the nineteenth century saw relics as medical specimens that might solve the divine mystery of genius; the continued study of those remains today, from hair-testing to genome sequencing, preserves the composer as if in formaldehyde. In part two, I examine a moment when the museum culture of the “beautiful death” took a more literal turn. In the early twentieth century, Bruckner-lovers processed into a crypt by candlelight to behold the composer’s waxen body through a window. The stubborn persistence of the embalmed body confronted devotees with startling indignities, from the co-optation of Bruckner’s death cult by the Nazis to the restoration of his corpse in 1996, which transformed a Catholic relic into an anthropological artifact. These material remainders show how a desire for eternal life and beautiful death has been the engine of European heritage, and how canons are perpetuated by the impulse to collect, display, and possess the composer’s body.
Biography
Abigail Fine is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oregon. Her research puts musicological questions in dialogue with offbeat artifacts—relics, amateur lyric, albums and visitors’ books, postcards, and other ephemera—that lie at the margins of the discipline. Through these materials she examines how the politics of heritage, the formation of canons, and practices of art-religion were enacted on the ground in popular culture. Her work has appeared in 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, and the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Her book, titled The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2025.