Grave robbers: when composer's body parts went missing.....
Often admired and adored during their lifetimes, the great composers would, you might think, enjoy similar reverence after death. Once the last rites had been read, surely these great cultural icons would be left in peace, the very notion of tampering with their corpses deemed an act of unacceptable desecration?
Sadly not, it would seem. Over the centuries, various composers have, for one reason or another, suffered the indignity having their bodies hoiked around from A to B or, worse still, literally taken apart. Prepare yourself for some of the more notorious examples…
Haydn loses his head
On 31 May 1809, at the age of 77, Joseph Haydn died at his home in Gumpendorf, near Vienna, as Napoleon’s troops bombarded the poor city. Overshadowed by the turmoil of war, Haydn’s burial was a quiet affair at Vienna’s Hundsturm Cemetery… but the great man would not rest in peace for long. On 4 June, lured by an offer of money, a gravedigger exhumed his body, severed the decomposing head and delivered the skull to Johann Nepomuk Peter and Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, a gruesome pair of phrenology enthusiasts who believed you could tell a lot about a person from the bumps on their skull.
After a brief ‘scientific’ examination, the skull was cleaned, bleached and placed in a decorative cabinet in Peter’s home, but its wanderings were far from over. In 1820, when Prince Nicholas Esterházy II tried to move Haydn’s remains to the family seat at Eisenstadt, he discovered the body was headless. Peter and Rosenbaum confessed – but handed over a fake skull instead. The real one stayed hidden for over a century. Finally, in 1954, after passing through collectors and museums, Haydn’s skull and body were reunited in a ceremony at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt – nearly 150 years after his death.
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Beethoven’s hair-raising tales
When Beethoven died in 1827, Vienna went into mourning. A grand funeral was held, attended by thousands (including a young Schubert), and the composer was buried in the city’s Währing Cemetery. But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Fast forward to 1863, when Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) decided to exhume Beethoven’s body in order to study his remains. During the exhumation, several individuals, including anatomists and music lovers, apparently pocketed fragments of the composer’s skull. Who exactly took what remains uncertain, but various skull fragments have since surfaced, some even making their way to California.
Then there’s the matter of Beethoven’s hair, locks of which were snipped off on his deathbed by admirers, a common practice at the time. These strands were passed down through generations and dispersed across Europe and the US. Later analysis revealed alarmingly high levels of lead – possibly explaining Beethoven’s deafness and numerous other health complaints.
In 1888, Beethoven was reburied, this time in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof cemetery, where he lies today alongside Schubert, Brahms and Salieri. But questions linger. Several skull fragments attributed to Beethoven remain scattered in collections, and debate continues over their authenticity.
In death, as in life, Beethoven couldn’t quite escape drama. Whether being dissected for science or scattered like relics, his remains tell a fascinating story about how 19th-century society revered, and at times exploited, its geniuses.
Mozart and the mysterious skull
On his death in 1791 at just 35, Mozart was buried in a common grave at Vienna’s St Marx cemetery, in accordance with local custom for middle-class citizens. Despite myths suggesting he was dumped into a pauper’s pit, it’s most likely he was given a modest but dignified burial, though no permanent marker was placed. After a decade, the grave would have been re-used.
But here’s where things get strange. In 1801, the cemetery’s gravedigger Joseph Rothmayer claimed to have marked the location of Mozart’s grave – and to have recovered the composer’s skull when the grave was exhumed. The sacred skull passed through several hands before eventually finding its way to the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, where it remains today in a display case, peering out from under glass like a ghost of genius past.
Disappointingly, however, scientific analysis has cast doubt on the skull’s provenance. DNA tests comparing it to the remains of Mozart’s relatives yielded frustratingly inconclusive results, and some experts believe it’s more likely to belong to someone else entirely.
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Chopin’s home is where the heart is
Chopin left his native Poland for Paris in 1831, at the age of 21, and remained there until his death 18 years later. He was buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery… but his final wish was for his heart to return to his beloved Poland. In a remarkable and slightly macabre journey, his sister Ludwika honoured that wish – smuggling the composer’s heart from France to Warsaw in a jar of cognac, hidden beneath her clothing to avoid attracting the attention of border guards.
Chopin’s heart eventually came to rest, entombed in a pillar of Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church and encased in what is now a crystal vial. A plaque on the pillar marks its presence, and each year Poles gather to pay tribute to their beloved musical son.
One night in 2014, amid concerns for the heart’s preservation, the Polish government quietly opened the crypt to check its condition. Officials and scientists conducted the inspection with solemnity – there were even prayers and a Chopin piece played during it – before sealing the organ back in place. Heartwarming stuff.
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Berlioz has grave concerns
The afterlife of Hector Berlioz has been almost as dramatic as his visionary, mercurial music. Upon his death in 1869, the French composer was buried in Paris’s Montmartre cemetery… shortly before all hell broke loose.
During the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, Berlioz’s grave was desecrated amid political chaos and anti-establishment fervour. The extent of the damage is unclear, but his tomb was reportedly vandalised by radicals who, wrongly, saw Berlioz as aligned with the social elite.
Later in the 19th century, his remains were moved elsewhere within the same cemetery, this time to a more prominent and carefully maintained grave. There, he was reburied beside his two great loves: his first wife, actress Harriet Smithson, and his second wife, Marie Recio.
Paganini is kept waiting
Finally, the strange case of Niccolò Paganini, whose reputation as a devilishly good violinist came back to haunt him. After his death in 1840, the Catholic Church denied Paganini a religious burial in his native Genoa, partly because he’d refused the last rites before death (probably because he didn’t believe he was dying) but also, intriguingly, due to a demonic subplot – his playing was indeed so astonishing that rumours swirled that he’d made some kind of a deal with Lucifer, with his gaunt appearance and eerie stage presence only adding fuel to the stories.
As a result, Paganini’s body remained unburied for several weeks and was initially kept in a hospital chapel. But when burial was still denied, his embalmed corpse was moved from place to place – first to a private cellar, then to an abandoned leper house and reportedly at one point even to an olive oil factory.
Eventually, after a four-year struggle and an appeal to the Pope by his son Achille, the late virtuoso was allowed to be transported to Genoa. Even then, the composer’s body was not immediately buried. It remained in limbo for years – travelling in a coffin stored in various places, sometimes on Achille’s property, where it caused unease among neighbours.
Paganini’s remains were finally laid to rest in 1876 in a cemetery in Parma – and were reinterred in a new graveyard in the same city 20 years later. Peace at last.
