Work-in-Progress talk by Abigail Fine, Musicology, University of Oregon

Sacred Traces: Composers, Relics, and Art-Religion in Practice In nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, music-lovers treated composers as saints by collecting relics and flocking to historic houses as pilgrims. These devotees to Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and others left records of their activities in archival ephemera that are not the standard materials of musicology, and these offbeat sources provide a new window into what I call “art-religion in practice.” This lecture is populated by tourists who wrote heartfelt odes in museum visitors’ books and keepsake albums, men’s choirs who serenaded a Mozart shrine on a mountaintop, music-loving doctors who cherished composers’ remains, and Christ-like casts of Beethoven’s face that decorated parlor walls. I argue that nineteenth-century devotees modeled the “parasocial” relationships we recognize today in celebrity culture, which have led fans to seek out traces of the artist’s body and to cultivate more intimate modes of musical listening.