Dr. Abigail Fine, Assistant Professor of Musicology at UO School of Music and Dance, studies the eccentric ways in which 19th-century German and Austrian music lovers remembered dead composers. This culture of “composer devotion” involved venerating composers through relics, rituals, pilgrimage, exhumation, and embalming.
In her new book, The Composer Embalmed, Fine investigates how devotees sought to sanctify composers by preserving their bodies, belongings, and shrines. The book also critiques this “relic culture,” showing how these practices blurred the line between reverence and desecration.
Question: What more will readers discover in your book?
Answer: Rather than draw abstract parallels between composers and saints or simply reiterate that composers were “deified” (a concept that’s quite familiar by now), I wanted to dig underneath those claims and see how sanctity worked on the ground. That meant uncovering a network of little-known devotees to composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, etc.—and looking not only at their devotional behaviors and writings, but at the at the many cultural critics who found that devotion puzzling, laughable, or even dangerous.
Question: How did you start researching this topic?
Answer: While the earnest work on the book started several years ago, my interest in these topics goes all the way back to my undergrad years, when I wrote a paper on Chopin’s deathbed in popular culture. I started looking at quirky sources like postcards, biographical novels (an early predecessor to biopic films), and casts of Chopin’s face and hands. In graduate school, I kept pondering death masks, which I had seen on display in composers’ museums. I found these objects chilling because they are so immediate and tangible: the composer’s face (warts and all!) just lies there in a glass case, intimate yet cold, in a weird zone between living and dead. I started wondering about how people connect with composers’ music as likewise living and dead, an eternal afterimage of a person. By the time I started my faculty job, and set to work on the book, I realized how much more there is to say about rituals and relics.
Question: What was your favorite discovery when researching?
Answer: Rather than a one-big-discovery type of book, this project navigates a large number of smaller finds—I love when a bigger picture emerges from the corners of the archive. While abroad, I found quite a lot of evocative, at times sensual poems and odes written for composers, nearly always by music-loving women. In the visitors’ books of Beethoven’s birth-house museum in Bonn, I found a poignant message written in morse code by a British soldier in the 1920s, which gave me goosebumps and landed in the final words of the book. And, of course, I uncovered quirky little mysteries. While sifting through the tattered notebooks of one of Anton Bruckner’s students, I found a neat map, drawn in pencil, that showed exactly where Bruckner sat in his regular Vienna coffee house. The map was drawn not by the student, but by the famous occultist Rudolf Steiner. Maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Bruckner and Steiner sitting down over coffee. What did they talk about?
Question: What do you want your readers to take away from it?
Answer: I’m so glad you ask, as it gives me a rare chance to explain which parts of the book are for whom. This is an academic book, but it’s full of storytelling, much of which is entertaining and (I hope) thought-provoking for all kinds of readers. Classical music lovers who still today go on “pilgrimage” to historic museums, who feel the composer’s person radiating out of the notes, and who love dead composers without fully understanding why, will find their feelings echoed in these pages. When we write academic books, we discuss the work of other researchers, but readers outside musicology are not interested in who argues what in the field. General readers should know that the academic theorizing happens in the introduction and beginnings and ends of chapters, while the preface and the middles of chapters are where you’ll find storytelling with material straight from the archives.
As for what to take away, spoiler alert, I make three major arguments about “piety,” the word Germans used at the time to describe what they were doing. All three could apply to celebrity culture today. 1) Acts of piety are hopelessly entangled with desecration. 2) The sacred vocabulary of piety (“relics” or “pilgrimage”) can veil a competitive and transactional desire to possess and exhibit remains, which comes from the exhibitionary aspects of early anthropology. 3) The nineteenth century’s bubble of sanctity burst in the twentieth, and what’s left over is a kitsch replica of religion, too ironic and self-conscious to be sacred.
Question: Where can people find your book?
Answer: You can buy this as a $35 paperback on the University of Chicago Press website, or from all major retailers. It’s available for pre-order now and it comes out in June 2025.
Question: What are you working on next?
Answer: I’ve started working on a few new areas. I’m interested in keepsake albums—these were collections of handwritten pages offered as gifts to family and friends, which map out social networks, etiquette, playful repartée, and of course forgotten music. I’m writing an article on what happens when keepsake albums are kept by a music institution, like a museum or music society, which makes the intimacy of those gifts into a public attraction and an archive, a time capsule designed for posterity. I’m also drawn to the vast quantities of forgotten piano and vocal music written for amateurs, which appeared in subscription magazines and bore colorful titles that reflect aspects of daily life. This music differs from the virtuosic art that’s the mainstay of recital programs—the music is easy, and some might say cheesy, but it helps us reconstruct the tastes and interests of middle-class musicians, especially women at the piano. What can we learn about nineteenth-century culture from this music? (The best part: this project forces me onto the piano bench to get back in practice.)