Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey

Author:Colin Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781932961867
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

FRAGMENTS OF A MYSTERY

Mysteries surround Beethoven’s death; perhaps they always will.

With the temporal bones lost, an accurate diagnosis of his deafness may never be made, and even a recent DNA analysis of his hair has raised at least as many questions as it has answered. His ailments may have been caused by lead poisoning, or perhaps by a treatment of mercury for syphilis or some other problem, but in all likelihood the answer will never be known. And then there is the question of the skull fragments, the second set to be removed, extracted, in 1863 during the first exhumation and noted only in the second exhumation. Who gave them to Romeo Seligmann?

Dr. William Meredith, who runs the Ira F. Brilliant Center of Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University has pointed to Gerhard von Breuning. Gerhard had the motive, being perhaps the most vocal proponent of keeping Beethoven’s head in a museum rather than having it go back into the ground. And he had the means, since of all those present he was the only one ever to be left alone with the skull. The missing fragments were from the back of the skull and thus would not have been missed when Breuning arranged the fragments face up in the casket for reburial. And the fragments were kept—it would later be discovered—in specially made zinc boxes, the same kind as the ones Breuning ordered for the clothing and other nonhuman remains.

Meredith offered another plausible explanation. “Perhaps Breuning did not lose the argument on October 15, 1863,” he suggested, “about the reburial of the skulls. Of all the people involved in the exhumation, he held a unique position, having been Beethoven’s friend as a teenager. His word and moral authority in this regard must have carried special weight. Perhaps the Committee agreed to an undocumented compromise. Perhaps Breuning himself was allowed to keep the two large fragments, but the matter was not to be made public.”151

It may be that the act was on someone else’s initiative, but if so, Breuning must at least have been complicit. The same man who watched his father go to such lengths to safeguard the composer and his legacy that it literally killed him, who would later lament the lost memories and reference points from the past as the Währing cemetery was plowed under and the remains of these great men were separated—this same man had a hand in one way or another in the further fragmentation of Beethoven’s remains.

BREUNING SEEMS TO us now a figure who straddles multiple epochs. He received his medical training at a time when the field of medicine was changing and beginning to assume the shape it has today. Centuries-old practices such as blood-letting were falling out of favor, and others were taking their place. In 1847 Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss—working in the same hospital in Vienna where Haydn’s head had been cleaned in 1809—discovered pathogenic germs after he discovered that doctors attending births directly after performing autopsies were transmitting puerperal fever to their patients.

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