The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch: New Material Histories of Music
Autor Abigail Fineen Limba Engleză Paperback – 5 iun 2025
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. In The 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 Beethoven’s 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 culture—a 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 Embalmed reveals the underbelly of the canon, where guilty pleasures blur the boundary between sanctity and desecration.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226840444
ISBN-10: 0226840441
Pagini: 288
Ilustrații: 34 halftones, 4 line drawings
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Seria New Material Histories of Music
ISBN-10: 0226840441
Pagini: 288
Ilustrații: 34 halftones, 4 line drawings
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Seria New Material Histories of Music
Notă biografică
Abigail Fine is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Oregon.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations and Musical Example
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Beethoven’s Nativity
Chapter 2: Mozart on the Mountaintop
Chapter 3: From Relic to Specimen
Chapter 4: Beethoven’s Masks and the Beautiful Death
Chapter 5: Art-Religion Verkitscht
Coda
Acknowledgments
List of Archival Materials and Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Beethoven’s Nativity
Chapter 2: Mozart on the Mountaintop
Chapter 3: From Relic to Specimen
Chapter 4: Beethoven’s Masks and the Beautiful Death
Chapter 5: Art-Religion Verkitscht
Coda
Acknowledgments
List of Archival Materials and Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index