Composers' Death Masks

USED IMAGES FROM HERE: http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/, WHICH ARE ALL COPYRIGHTED. MAY HAVE TO KILL POST. We don't often think about our own death. First, it's creepy.  Second, we're too busy doing all the things only the living would want to do.  Third, it's difficult for us to wrap our minds around being (not being?) in a state of non-existence (though weren't we all once in that state before we touched down on earth?), evidence that this world and all its trifles is a never-ending dream. But die we all must, eventually. And as Halloween approaches we can at least look death in the eye, maybe even chuckle at it a bit, can't we? Do you remember the tradition of death masks? It extends back at least to Classical antiquity and involves taking a mold of the face of a recently deceased person to preserve his or her likeness forever. As with all rituals surrounding death, the preserving and viewing of death masks are for the living: to remind us that, although each of us will die, we share a place on the great deathless continuum of humankind, a continuum that includes the likes of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler other brilliant minds that came before us. All of these stars in the classical music firmament appear in painted portraits or even photographs.  But often those images don't give a sense of what the people they depict were like.  Being three-dimensional, death masks offer a final impression (literally) of an actual flesh-and-blood human, who once occupied space on our planet.  I found online some images of composers' death masks and thought we could have a little Halloween fun looking at them here. Let's start with Beethoven, because we all love him.  He was known in his day for his eccentric public demeanor.  He was almost always broke, his personal hygiene was questionable, and his short fuse was the stuff of legend.  His music expresses the full gamut of human emotions, from tenderness, to fury, to the profound longing for peace and redemption.  I say the longing for peace, because I'm not sure Beethoven's music ever really does convey peace, just the earnest and reasonable hope that one day all the world's problems and annoying people will go away. My sense is that Beethoven loved humankind but often wasn't so thrilled with people.  But I don't believe the author of the now famous music to Schiller's An die Freude (Ode to Joy) was ever truly satisfied with this distance from the public; he just had to get through life as a hypersensitive genius in a heartless world, and removing himself from the vortex of society was one way to do it.  I like that Beethoven's death mask shows him in an eternal pout, as though all of those deep emotions, all his love for and anger with and ambivalence toward human beings, were still coursing through his veins.  But I wouldn't choose this moment to ask for his autograph or to ask him if his deafness made him write all those dissonances in the opening of the finale of the Ninth Symphony.  Let the man rest in peace if, in fact, he really did find it. In 1827 Franz Schubert was one of Beethoven's pallbearers and marched in the procession that made all Vienna weep.  The following year, Schubert, the composer of Schwanengesang sang his own swansong after a life of prolific composing and, depending on whom you read, sexual abandon.  This deathmask of Schubert isn't to me so interesting as knowing about the place where he died: an apartment on an upper floor of a building on Vienna's Kettenbruckengasse.  Impressions from a pilgrimage I made to this building one warm August day several years ago remain with me. I entered the building off a wide but otherwise nondescript street and walked up what I remember to be a fairly narrow set of stairs to the building's third (was it the second?) floor.  Imagine a hallway lined with doors made of dark wood and wrapping in a square around a central courtyard.  For a moment, I stood still, wondering whether to turn right or left.  Then, to my left, a woman with curlers in her hair and wearing only shorts and a bra scurried out of an apartment into another door nearby.  I decided then to turn right.  Only steps away was an open door, which led visitors like me to the very room (now a museum) where Schubert breathed his last. I wondered whether Schubert had neighbors who might have run through the hallways in their underwear.  I wondered who carried him down that long and narrow staircase and transported him to his resting place in Wahring cemetery, outside Vienna.  Was Schubert's death, I wondered, as richly human and dramatic as his hundreds and hundreds of songs? Speaking of drama, let's talk about Wagner's death mask, which resides in the Richard Wagner Museum at his former home, Wahnfried, in Bayreuth.  Wagner was much maligned in his own day (by some for his music, by some for his unambiguous anti-Semitism) and remains controversial today.  But this death mask suggests that he really may have found peace in his parting.  There's the character in Die Meistersinger - Sixtus Beckmesser, the official marker of Nürnberg's song contest - whom Wagner casts in ridiculously peckish music.  Beckmesser was Wagner's operatic effigy of the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, whom Wagner hated for criticzing his music in preference for that of Brahms. Did Wagner really care about his critics?  I'm not sure.  He might have had just the right pathologies not to care.  On the other hand, those pathologies may have come about as scars from too much bruising of a skin too thin to endure much of anything at all.  But what didn't kill him made him strong enough to compose the Ring cycle, and in his death mask I see a grin, maybe at Hanslick, maybe at the world at large.  Were he at the time the mask was made able to thumb his nose at all of us, I almost think he might have. Gustav Mahler might have done many things, but I doubt nose-thumbing would have been among them.  This was the composer so traumatized by the hurdy-gurdy man's playing of Ach, du lieber Augustin on the streets outside his death-ridden and contentious family home that for the rest of his life he harbored truly pathological angst about death and the trials of life. In his music, Mahler sought to reconcile life and death, or at least to come to some conclusion about whether either was good or bad.  In Das Lied von der Erde, the baritone sings "Dark is life, is death," but in his Fourth Symphony, the soprano sings sweetly of all the bread and saints in heaven.  I'm not sure whether, in this life, Mahler ever came to any firm conclusions here. But when I look at Mahler's death mask, I see a hint that maybe death for him turned out to be not so dark, more light and angels.  Yes, there's the impression that he's still mulling things over, but there's also what appears to be a gentle smile, like one he might show a sweeetly singing angel.  In that smile there might even be some confirmation of an afterlife, about which Mahler composed music so sublimely beautiful in his Second Symphony - his so-called "Resurrection" symphony - that even the rocks weep to hear it.  When I look at this death mask, I hear the final chord of Das Lied von der Erde, an inconclusive harmony suggesting the infinity of death and life, drifting away into silence, the great canvas of time and life and music. Happy Halloween. --Jennifer Hambrick