The Song of the Dying Composer

One of my guilty pleasures is that subgenre of academic thriller wherein a plucky humanities scholar makes a world-shaking discovery. Among the wave of such novels that emerged before, during, and after the craze for The Da Vinci Code, very few academic protagonists were musicologists. Laetitia Forzza, protagonist of Philippe Delelis’s La Dernière Cantate, discovers an error in her counterpoint exam that leads to her uncovering a secret musical code — and, incidentally, a centuries-old religious conspiracy behind the deaths of Mozart and Anton Webern. Sarah Weston, the heroine of Magnus Flyte’s City of Dark Magic and City of Lost Dreams, is a Beethoven scholar who finds herself at the center of a complicated plot involving Cold War espionage and time-travel drugs. (Even more fantastically, the sequel reveals that her dissertation has been widely read outside of musicology). I probably don’t need to spell out the ways this is not reflective of my day-to-day life as a musicologist, but there is something deeply appealing about the idea of solving a musical mystery.¹

When I talk about “solving mysteries,” some are extremely literal. The identity of the intended recipient of Ludwig van Beethoven’s so-called “Immortal Beloved” letter has inspired some fantastic theorizing in both fiction and biography.² The infamous debates in the 1990s over the sexualities of Franz Schubert or George Frideric Handel demonstrate, among other things, that the intersections between historical unknowns, biographical narratives, and scholarly analysis can be quite fraught.³ Musicologists are by no means immune from engaging in disputes over the interpretation of evidence.

In my recent work on historical gossip and musical crime fiction, I’ve thought a lot about the fascination with certain composers’ last works and deaths, some of it veering into the conspiratorial.⁴ Speculation about the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (and his supposed rivalry with Antonio Salieri) may have initially emerged as everyday theatrical gossip but quickly encompassed both sober reflections on the nature of artistic genius and sensational crime fiction. Aleksandr Pushkin’s “little tragedy” Motsart i Salyeri (1830) imagines its titular characters discussing whether criminality is incompatible with art. Gustav Nicolai’s Der Musikfeind (1835/1838) treats music itself as a corrupting force, driving an obvious Salieri stand-in to artistic ruin, mental despair, and self-harm.⁵ And these are just the works that emerged in the decade following Salieri’s death.

Music can be frustrating to talk about. It is easy to come across as jargony or cheesy. “Writing (or talking) about music is like dancing about architecture” has been (mis)attributed to any number of composers and critics.⁶ But attaching a mystery to a famous musician or work gives us something to hold onto. It makes it easier to talk about what we like and dislike. It also provides a script that is remarkably resilient.

When I gave a talk on unreliable historical sources on the deaths of Mozart and Tchaikovsky to some liberal arts students at Concordia, I was surprised when one of them asked if I had heard the apocryphal story that producer J Dilla mixed his final album from his hospital bed. I wasn’t surprised by the story itself — every style of music has its own canons, gossip, and mythmaking — but rather by how it matched the legends of Mozart’s Requiem or Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathétique beat by beat (pun intended). All of these legends connected a creator’s final work to their death, uniting the work and death with a tragic mystery. (Never mind that Dilla’s album wasn’t mixed using the exact kind of technology some claim, some recognizable portions of Mozart’s Requiem were actually completed by Franz Süssmayr, and the Pathétique wasn’t Tchaikovsky’s great confession.)⁷

The durability of musical mysteries should not be mistaken for universality. While stories of the great “last work” or the tragic artist are long-lasting, the details and meanings assigned to them shift and change over time and place.  Crime fiction and purported nonfiction about Salieri and/or Mozart since the 1830s have focused on such varied topics as national and linguistic identity, the business of opera, secret societies, French revolutionary theatre, censorship, and (as per Peter Shaffer) professional envy and personal reputation. The gossip that has surrounded Tchaikovsky since his death in 1893 reflects more about the speaker’s views on homosexuality, mental health, symphonic music, and social class in imperial Russia than anything about Tchaikovsky’s own sense of identity. J Dilla mythmaking takes place very much in living memory, yet reflects how ideas about technology, masculinity, race, and legacy in US society intersect with conceptions of musical genius and the deification of deceased artists.

Like history, music and death are frequently messy. Detection — whether real, fictional, or somewhere in between — promises to contain that messiness, to give it some narrative sense. Unlike a detective novel, however, there is rarely an answer that explains all that we want to find when pondering the past’s unknowns or listening to something that moves us.

1. Philippe Delelis, La Dernière Cantate (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1998), translated by Sue Rose as The Last Cantata (London: Toby Press, 2000); Magnus Flyte (pseud. Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch), City of Dark Magic (New York: Penguin Books, 2012) and City of Lost Dreams (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).
2. Readers may be familiar with the biopics Immortal Beloved (dir. Bernard Rose, 1994) and Copying Beethoven (dir. Agnieszka Holland, 2006), both of which purported to explain Beethoven’s complicated personal and professional relationships. Musicologists and biographers who have examined the Immortal Beloved question over the years include Paul Bekker, Wolfgang Alexander Thomas-San-Galli, Jacques Prod’homme, Maynard Solomon, William Kindermann, and Jan Caeyers (among others). For an overview of the history of Beethoven biography, see Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2020).
3. For summaries of these debates, see the special issue of 19th-Century Music edited by Lawrence Kramer on “Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture” (1993); Gary C. Thomas, “Was George Frideric Handel ‘Gay’: On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 273–94; and Ellen Harris, “Homosexual Context and Identity: Reflections on the Reception of Handel as Orpheus,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 41–68.
4. Kristin M. Franseen, “‘Everything You’ve Heard is True’: Resonating Musicological Anecdotes in Crime Fiction about Antonio Salieri,” Journal of Historical Fictions 4, no. 1 (2022): 41–60.
5. For more on this odd Gothic novella, see my “Talking to Ghosts: Salieri Horror and the Messiness of Genius,” VAN Magazine (April 2022).
6. A quick search reveals variations of the quote attributed to such varied figures as Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Clara Wieck Schumann, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many, many, many others. Garson O’Toole identifies Martin Mull as the “most likely originator of this expression,” while citing related earlier sayings. See O’Toole, “Writing About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture,” Quote Investigator, Nov. 8, 2010.
7. For more on research challenging and contextualizing these specific myths, see William Stafford, The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Philip Ross Bullock, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2016); and Dan Charnas with Jeff Peretz, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). I would like to thank Ethan Rudge for introducing me to the mythology surrounding J Dilla’s death and last album.