Review of The Composer Embalmed by Abigail Fine

It is fitting to write this review after attending the "Dark Sides of Life in Schubert's Vienna," the fifth annual conference of the Schubert Research Center (October 22-24, 2025).Death was a recurring theme-encapsulated by a guided tour of the St Marx Cemetery (the site of Mozart's grave).The Composer Embalmed homes in on this enduring fascination with the deadthe ways in which "music lovers sought to possess, scrutinize, and eroticize the body of the departed genius" (p.3).Why, Fine asks, did devotes desire "imaginative and intimate relationships with composers long gone" (p.8)?And why the craze for "tactile encounters" with dead bodies (p.9)?Across five chapters-"Beethoven's Nativity," "Mozart on the Mountaintop," "From Relic to Specimen," "Beethoven's Masks and the Beautiful Death," and "Art-Religion Verkitscht"-Fine situates these practices within the context of "relic culture," a culture that sought to "preserve, study, and display the composer's earthly traces" (p.9).She documents how devotees slipped between honoring the dead and anthropomorphizing relics-historic houses, monuments, paintings, visitor books, hearts, skulls, masks, and locks of hair.Experiences could be private, pious or erotic, public, hyperbolic or kitsch, or somewhere in between.For the devotees in question, such experiences afforded direct connections with the deceased; for musicologists, they pose fascinating questions about knowledge production, of how we understand intangible acts of mourning as subjects of historical inquiry.Fine narrates this history with forensic attention to detail, vivid prose, and imaginative interpretations of source material.Chapter 1 takes readers to Beethoven's birth house in Bonn (which was made a museum in 1889, a "shrine of Nativity", p. 20) and his death house in Vienna (the latter demolished in 1903).Both were central sites of relic culture, "repositories for devotion on the ground" (p.21).Entering such spaces could be a sacred experience, an opportunity to inhale the air in which the composer took their first or last breath.More was at stake, though, than a fleeting encounter.As Fine shows, visitor books allowed devotees to record their impressions and establish connections through the 1