Discovering Beethoven’s Mother’s Grave: Historical Background by F. Knickenberg | Beethoven Music Research Center www.lvbeethoven.org

Die Auffindung des Grabes der Mutter Beethovens:

I. geschichtliche Voraussetzungen der Auffindung.
Von F. Knidkenberg, Bonn.

(The discovery of Beethoven’s mother’s grave: I. Historical premises of the discovery. By F. Knickenberg, Bonn.)

The death of his beloved mother, which occurred on 17 July 1787, plunged the seventeen‑year‑old Ludwig van Beethoven into the deepest mourning. It is known that the eldest son of Johann van Beethoven, court organist and violist in the court orchestra, died in 1787. We know that the son Ludwig, court organist and violist in the court orchestra, was urgently recalled from Vienna in the spring of 1787 because of the worsening of his mother’s illness, and that he managed to return to Bonn at the beginning of the summer of that same year with the greatest possible haste. He found her still alive, though gravely ill, but only fourteen days later death released her from her long and painful suffering, consumption, at a little over forty years of age. The mother’s death struck Ludwig with particular force, both because with her passing the centre of gravity of the family disappeared, and because he himself believed he had the same serious illness, which he called “Engbrüstigkeit” (“constriction”) in the first letter cited. He saw his brothers — for whom he had already had to care as a boy because of the father’s lack of support — abandoned to a sad and very uncertain future. For the father, because of his weak character, began the sorrowful period in which he tried to drown his worries in wine; until then it had been the wife who had taken material care of the children, especially the eldest, and of their spiritual needs, balancing them with love. Thus one understands the moving words that the son addressed to the councillor of Augsburg, von Schaden, whose friendship he enjoyed in maturity, only a few weeks after his mother’s death, in the first letter from Bonn that has come down to us.

Given Beethoven’s intimate bond with his adored mother, it was an understandable wish of all admirers to know the place where Ludwig had stood to weep for her in 1787. Yet all of Beethoven’s biographers, from Thayer onward, searched in vain for the grave of the great man’s mother. Even contemporaries and friends, such as the Wegelers, provided no useful information. In the end it was assumed that, like the deceased of Bonn’s principal parish church for many centuries, she had been buried in its very small cemetery — today’s Römerplatz. Because of the narrowness of the space, extremely poor hygienic conditions had long since developed here, so much so that the Elector of Cologne and Archbishop Clemens August had already imposed in 1725 a strict prohibition on further burials in the overcrowded churchyard — although, apparently, without lasting success. The cemetery was definitively abandoned only in 1787, as will be discussed below. In 1804 the old church of St. Remigius burned down completely, and the small churchyard was soon entirely levelled. Thus, even if Beethoven’s mother had found her final resting place here, it would have become impossible to rediscover her grave, as in the case of the grave of Ludwig’s namesake grandfather.

The new grave of Maria Magdalena Keverich – Bonn Alter Friedhof

Some time ago, an elderly citizen of Bonn, Mr Heinrich Baum, now living in Düsseldorf, expressed his regret that during the many musical festivals in Bonn no one had remembered the grave of the mother, that no one had adorned the resting place of the woman who had given birth to a Beethoven! In corresponding with him, it emerged that in his youth, in the 1870s, as a pupil of the local school, he had been taken by an excellent teacher together with classmates to the old cemetery opposite the Sterntor, to visit the graves of the many immortals whose remains rest there. And here they were also led to an inaccessible, completely neglected grave beneath a wall: here Beethoven’s mother was buried!

On the wall there still existed a half‑eroded sandstone slab on which the names Maria Magdalena van Beethoven and Keverich, the woman’s maiden name, could still be deciphered. About thirty years ago, when he saw the place for the last time, the slab had completely detached and lay broken behind the old, dense ivy on the wall of the cemetery on Bornheimer Straße.

Today, of course, there is no trace of it; the cemetery administration has surely removed the unrecognisable debris, as with many others of the kind. Thus it would hardly have been possible to find the grave, even using Baum’s very specific information, whose reliability could not be doubted. Indeed, before 1815 no cemetery registers were kept.

But my informant made a second revelation: on the same grave there had been another small stone bearing the name (in Italian) “Matari + 1826”, which, strangely, stood at the foot of the same burial — now vanished — whose name had only recently come back to his memory. This latter information was also confirmed by the cemetery register, properly kept during the Prussian period. This grave could therefore be reliably identified.

Naturally, as I was able to ascertain, other former schoolmates also remember the visits to the cemetery, but not that neglected and unseemly grave, which at the time stood near far more impressive tombs that remained in the children’s memory, such as that of E. M. Arndt with the beautiful gnarled oak planted by the poet’s own hands, or that of Friedrich Schiller’s wife and son, both located very close to the abandoned one.

In Baum’s case, the simple fact of the location of Frau Beethoven’s grave remained firmly in his memory because he was the great‑grandson of that Frau Ratskellermeister Baum who, together with Beethoven’s grandfather Ludwig van Beethoven, had served as godparent to the newborn Ludwig, who received his grandfather’s name at his baptism on 17 December 1770.

As is known, the woman lived in the nearby house “Zum Mohren” in the Bonngasse, next to Beethoven’s birthplace, and the baptismal celebration also took place in her home. Naturally this event was not forgotten by the Baum family when the little infant became a man of great and famous name, and it was constantly mentioned in family conversations. This explains why that invisible patch of earth left no lasting impression on the childhood minds of most of his schoolmates, whereas it did for Baum, in whose family the tradition of the ancestor’s godparenthood had always remained alive.

Valuable as the information provided by my friend fortunately was, there still remained the possibility that he had been unconsciously mistaken. I therefore had to consider the following: if Baum’s statements were indeed correct, then two deceased persons must have been buried in the same grave that contained the remains of Matari, the second interred about forty years after the first. As the study of ancient burial regulations revealed, this was by no means impossible. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the electoral government stipulated that a grave had to be “wenigstens sechs Werckfuß”, that is, about 2.20 metres deep. Later, as is still the case today, a depth of 1.75 metres was sufficient. At that time, repeated use of the same burial place was always permitted. If the information provided to me was therefore correct, then a grave occupied in 1787 at the depth mentioned could have been reused without hesitation in 1826, after forty years, at the depth then customary.

At this point the question was examined of when the burial ground, now called the “Alter Friedhof”, came into exclusive use. Was it already so at the death of Beethoven’s mother in the summer of 1787? To my great satisfaction, the death register of the parish of St Remigius provided a much‑desired clarification, for it records that from the beginning of June 1787 only the “neue geweihte Begräbnisplatz vor dem Sterntor” was used: Initio Junii (1787) aperta est communis pro omnibus Sepultura extra Civitatis Moenia. This had been ordered for hygienic reasons by an edict of the last Elector, Max Franz, who, as is known, was also a patron of the young Beethoven; from that moment on, all burials inside and near the churches within the city area of Bonn were strictly forbidden. This is understandable if one recalls the conditions of the above‑mentioned Remigiuskirchhof! From then on, he designated as the general cemetery the “Soldatenfriedhof” in front of the Sterntor, so called because for centuries the numerous foreign mercenaries fallen and dead in many military events had found their final resting place in this small cemetery. This was found in the archives of our city. In the death list, begun in June 1787, the eleventh entry reads: “1787 die 17/ma Julii obiit Maria Magdalena Keverich dicta van Beethoven.” This shows that the deceased woman had been buried in the new burial ground.

If, in the place indicated to me in the old cemetery, two skeletons lay one above the other in such a way that the person buried in 1826, according to the Prussian cemetery register, could be Matari and lay less deeply than the one buried in 1787, and if the lower skeleton belonged to a woman, then it could be established without doubt that Baum’s statement was correct.

The Beethoven‑Haus took charge of the investigation. We received permission from the municipal administration to open the grave and to have any finds examined scientifically. The local professor of anatomy and anthropology, Dr Wagenfeil, readily placed himself at our disposal, as did Prof. Dr Wilchens for any geological findings. The opening of the reconnaissance work took place on 22 March 1932 under the supervision of the board of the Beethoven‑Haus. The result, awaited with understandable excitement, fully confirmed the correctness of my considerations and Baum’s indications: at first, rather near the surface, fragments of disarticulated remains came to light — scattered human bones, undoubtedly from the earliest burials of the “Soldatenfriedhof”. Then, at a little more than 1.70 m depth, the complete skeleton of the man buried here in 1826, who, according to the civil register, had died at the age of 62. Of the coffin only a small amount of wood and parts of fine metal ornaments remained, while all other burial furnishings were completely absent. After carefully lifting the coffin and establishing that it did not yet rest on virgin soil, further excavation was carried out beyond 2 m depth, and the expected second skeleton was found, completely intact, and immediately recognised with certainty by the anatomist as female. We were standing before the mortal remains of Ludwig van Beethoven’s mother! (Digging even deeper, which we did for safety, we reached the cultivation layer, a clayey sand.) Needless to say, these remains too were recovered with the greatest care so that they could be examined anthropologically; the result is published below by Professor Wagenfeil. The remains of both deceased persons were placed after examination in new metal containers and recently returned to the earth in the same place. Engraved lead plates, soldered onto each zinc container, will indicate the remains in the future.

The house “Im Mohren” in the centre of Bonn (Bonngasse 18)

However, my report on the discovery and identification of Beethoven’s mother’s grave would not be complete if I did not cite other witnesses who came forward in response to my first account (Kölnische Zeitung 1932, no. 182, 3 April) and confirmed the accuracy of all the information. For example, an elderly lady, Mrs St., now living in Barmen, who spent her youth until marriage in the household of the Bonn music director Brambach, a relative of hers, told me that as a child she had been taken countless times to the aforementioned place by musician‑relatives and nature lovers whose house stood near the cemetery, and that just as often, as a young girl, she had stopped before that grave set against the cemetery wall. A master bookbinder from Bonn testified to me that he and his fellow apprentices knew and were familiar with the place where Beethoven’s mother lay, just as with the grave of E. M. Arndt and that of Schiller’s wife, which stood nearby. Naturally, he no longer remembered the exact details, just as Mr Baum did — for whom the place had a special significance, as already mentioned. For the others, however, the memory seems to have faded completely, even among the most prominent personalities of Bonn. One may ask how this could have happened!**

It remains to be explained how the grave could have vanished entirely from the memory of the citizens of Bonn, even of those representing musical and historical interests. When the grave of Beethoven’s mother was cleared to make room for a second burial forty years after the first interment — the already mentioned Matari — he, sensing the end was near, secured the spot six weeks before his death, according to the grave lists at the Bonn registry office. He was a complete stranger in Bonn, with no relatives in the city. His death was reported by a neighbour, a brewer named L. No one would have tended the grave after the dignified burial of 1826, once the small stone bearing his name had broken apart. It remained untended and neglected until it was carelessly removed. The stone bearing the names of Maria Magdalena, already present on the wall, shared the same fate, and a thick layer of ivy soon enveloped the abandoned grave. The place remained completely deserted; no document offered any visible information about who had been buried there. Yet some people still knew the place until the 1870s. It is thanks to Heinrich Baum that the family tradition and his love for Beethoven led him always to visit the burial site — even after the ruins of the old stones lay behind the ivy — and that he suggested, albeit late, that the matter be pursued so that in future the grave of the woman who gave birth to Beethoven would not be left without grateful care.

Maria Magdalena Keverich came from a good and respected family of Ehrenbreitstein, where she was born on 19 December 1746. Her father was the chief gardener of the Elector of Trier. Already a widow at the age of nineteen, she married the court musician Johann van Beethoven in Bonn on 12 November 1767 in the Remigiuskirche. Their second child — the first died only a few days after birth — was Ludwig, now the eldest of the children. With love and care, L. Schiedermair’s work Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig 1925) gathers everything that can give us a vivid image of the woman who stood so touchingly close to her great son. Unfortunately, no portrait of her exists. In the already mentioned letter to von Schaden, the son himself states with regret that henceforth he could bring before his soul an image resembling that of his beloved mother only thanks to his fine imagination. An oil painting (by Beckenkamp), which years ago — and sometimes still today! — was called “Mutter Beethovens”, has long been shown to have been arbitrarily and falsely so named. Her contemporaries portray her as a quiet and gentle woman, well respected by all.

It is therefore important for all friends of Beethoven to know at least the grave of the woman whose womb bore the great master, and the place where her son once stood in bitter mourning. From now on, she will no longer be deprived of the care and attention she deserves. The Beethoven‑Haus has placed a new stone on the cemetery wall, and the City of Bonn has undertaken its permanent maintenance. The famous “Alter Friedhof” of Bonn has gained a new point of interest.

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