Beethoven's Skull

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.

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.

At some point, however, things went wrong and he died in one of the first recorded cases of erotic asphyxiation.

God, give me the knowledge and wisdom to learn your holy commandments,
To hear them, to understand them;
And may your pity save me and protect me from this world of earth
Let it not destroy me with itself.

One of his poems mentions that he had “abandoned God for flesh.”

Je nuns hon pris that survives with music.

for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive.

The entire work is a fiction, with mythological content and probable ironic intent.

I will say this of myself:
For some time I was the Heodenings’ poet,
Dear to my lord, my name was “Deor.”
For many years I had a good position,
And a loyal lord until now that Heorrenda,
The man skilled in song, has received the estate
That the warriors’ guardian had given to me.
That went by, so may this.
That’s it. That’s the great tragedy. He was fired, laid off, given the boot; that’s the equivalent of all of these other heroic tragedies. Mass murder, imprisonment, torture, tyranny, unwanted pregnancy from a rape … all of that is easy, but losing his job? Now we’re talking disaster.