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Tim Rayborn

Beethoven's Skull

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Beethoven’s Skull is an unusual and often humorous survey of the many strange happenings in the history of Western classical music. Proving that good music and shocking tabloid-style stories make excellent bedfellows, it presents tales of revenge, murder, curious accidents, and strange fates that span more than two thousand years. Highlights include:
A cursed song that kills those who hear it
A composer who lovingly cradles the head of Beethoven’s corpse when his remains are exhumed half a century after his death
A fifteenth-century German poet who sings of the real-life Dracula
A dream of the devil that inspires a virtuoso violin piece
Unlike many music books that begin their histories with the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, Beethoven’s Skull takes the reader back to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, progressing through the Middle Ages and all the way into the twentieth century. It also looks at myths and legends, superstitions, and musical mysteries, detailing the ways that musicians and their peers have been rather horrible to one another over the centuries.
This book is currently unavailable
365 printed pages
Original publication
2016
Publication year
2016
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  • Анна П.shared an impression6 years ago
    👎Give This a Miss
    💡Learnt A Lot

Quotes

  • Анна П.has quoted6 years ago
    Again, we should just call it all the Later Middle Ages and be done with it; they’ll thank us for it in the thirty-first century.
  • Анна П.has quoted6 years ago
    Dussek was apparently quite proud of his good looks, or at least his profile. When performing, he turned the direction of the piano by 90 degrees. Previously, pianists had faced the audience. But with this new configuration, audiences now viewed him in profile and thus were spared none of the thrill. Interestingly, the idea caught on and is still the preferred positioning of pianists on stage to this day, regardless of how dashing (or not) their profiles may be.
  • Анна П.has quoted6 years ago
    At some point, however, things went wrong and he died in one of the first recorded cases of erotic asphyxiation.

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