“Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond”, by Tim Rayborn

304 pages, Skyhorse Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1510712713

Perhaps you’ve heard about the song that kills all who hear it? Or maybe you knew about the musician who lovingly cradled Beethoven’s head when the decomposing composer was exhumed half a century after his death? No? Well then how about the 15^th Century German poet who gave the world the first tales of Vlad Țepeș – y’know, Dracula? The dream that inspired a composer to write the violin sonata composed by the devil? Did you know that while Chopin’s body is buried in Paris his heart is enshrined within a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, or that Haydn’s head was stolen shortly after burial by phrenologists and the skull was reunited with the body only in 1954? These are the kinds of tales you’ll read all about in Tim Rayborn’s book Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond. A fan of classical music is sure to find some nuggets of knowledge in Beethoven’s Skull, but the book is also apt to be frustrating. The bulk of the book is a chronological list of figures that Rayborn has dirt on, but as the author himself admits, “you may have noticed a few big names missing”, an oversight that the author dismisses with the observation that they have already been amply covered in other books, or that they just “led pretty good lives”. What this means is that we’re left with a book of rather insignificant (though, it must be said, rather entertaining) trivia: Alessandro Poglietti, blown up by Ottoman artillery in 1683; Charles-Valentin Alkan, killed by a wayward bookcase in 1888; Wallingford Riegger, died when he tripped over the leashes of two fighting dogs 1961. There are chapters on Magic in Music – “Debussy apparently hobnobbed in occult circles” – Plague and Penitence – Rayborn finds some Renaissance music that may be about hashish – Blood and Guts – Vlad the Impaler, as mentioned above, didn’t have to do with music, but we get seven pages on him anyway, and other subtopics, as well. Rayborn isn’t afraid to gossip, which sounds juicy in theory but in actuality means he rehashes some very old canards: Vivaldi’s unproven affairs with his teenage students; Salieri’s supposed involvement with Mozart’s death, and so forth. There’s also an image section in the middle, but it's largely the same old headshots we've been looking at for centuries. So, just what is the story with Beethoven’s skull? You won’t find it in the entry on Beethoven, oddly enough: instead, you’ll just have to page forward to the Final Musical Oddities, where, fortunately (since there’s no index) it appears at the very end. A rather frivolous book overall, but not a bad way to spend a few minutes each night.