If you ever had questions about the private lives of composers, you’ll find a plethora of odd anecdotes in Tim Rayborn’s Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond, stretching back to antiquity. Although stories from then are thin on the ground, as the book goes forward to later times, the author has mined a rich vein of tales of skullduggery, criminal activity, mishaps, crazy or at the very least bizarre behavior attributed to composers, well known and otherwise.
The author is a professional musician with a specialty in medieval repertoire, with a PhD from the University of Leeds in England (though in what the author blurb does not indicate).
He has divided the book into periods of composer tales, starting with Ancient Greek and Rome and continuing to modern times, then adds chapters on specific subjects from Magic to Plague to Nursery Rhymes.
Unfortunately, Rayborn has written the book in relentlessly chatty style, which becomes tiresome when the material is scant, but possible to overlook in some of the later fascinating stories. There’s no doubt he did an immense amount of research to come up with many of the anecdotes he includes. Who knew that Bruckner had an obsession with dead bodies, managing to be present when Beethoven’s body was moved, seizing the skull and kissing it, then doing the same with Schubert’s and having finally to be forcibly removed from the scene both times?
This the quintessential “bathroom” book, a great read for those private moments of communing with nature. Each piece is short and unrelated to the next. Nor do you have to remember any of it, so no need to take notes.
