The Composer Embalmed

The first granular study of nineteenth-century composer devotion—a network of devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics, rituals, pilgrimage, exhumation, and embalming.   During the nineteenth century, music institutions promoted artworks they deemed timeless and made composers into figureheads of a lasting Western canon. Alongside this institutional face of the canon was a more intimate impulse to preserve, touch, and embrace the residues of the dead. In Germany an