Hanging around in graveyards isn’t just the reserve of goths: classical fans enjoy the occasional sojourn amongst the silent majority too, especially when it gives us the chance to venerate our dearly departed musical idols at their final resting places. Here are ten sites that all morbid devotees of music should visit before they, well, die.
1Vienna Central Cemetery
To start off, the big daddy of them all. The list of famous composers interred in the largest of Vienna’s 50-plus cemeteries reads like a roll call of some of the most influential figures in music from the Classical era up to the 20th century: the remains of Gluck, Antonio Salieri, Schubert, Beethoven, the Strauss dynasty (Johann I and II, plus Josef and Eduard), Ligeti and Schoenberg all ended up in this huge necropolis, which opened in 1874, either being laid to rest there initially or moved there from another site. It’s also a popular destination for musicians outside the classical realm: Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream and Weather Report’s Joe Zawinul are also buried here.
2Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
3Tikhvin Cemetery, St Petersburg
4St Marx Cemetery, Vienna
5St Thomas Church, Leipzig
6Bayreuth
While Liszt became less close with his son-in-law Wagner later in life, he still conducted the orchestra of the memorial concert when the music-drama innovator died in 1883. Indeed, the Hungarian spent his last days in a house overlooking the Villa Wahnfried, the mansion where Wagner and Liszt’s daughter Cosima had lived together and where the former was buried. Perhaps as a result of Liszt’s somewhat testy relationship with his daughter, the devout Catholic was buried – against his wishes – in the Lutheran City Cemetery of Bayreuth. Where he came to rest is within walking distance of the grave of the fellow composer with whom he’d had such a significant relationship.
7Cimetière de Passy, Paris
During the early years of Napoleon’s reign as emperor, burials within the city walls of Paris were outlawed, and four new necropolises were proposed to meet the new law. Like Père Lachaise (as well as Montmartre and Montpanasse), the Cimetière de Passy was part of this scheme. Opened in 1820, it is small compared to the others, but with such musical lights as Fauré and Debussy buried there, alongside visual artists like Manet, it still packs a cultural punch.
8Westminster Abbey, London
If the ground beneath Britain’s most well-known ecclesiastical building could make a sound, it would positively hum with the sound of English (or, to be picky, Anglo-German) music. In the north choir aisle, Henry Purcell lies where the organ once stood, not far from the plot where the ashes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and his wife Ursula are laid. In the south transept, at his personal request, the remains of Handel are interred in a lead coffin, watched over by a statue whose face was supposedly modelled on the composer’s death mask.
9Alter Friedhof, Bonn
Accounts of Robert Schumann’s last years spent in mental asylum make for depressing reading, but for those of a romantic bent, his final resting place suggests a modicum of poetic justice. He was buried in Bonn’s Old Cemetery, set up in 1715 initially as a place for military graves. His wife and fellow composer Clara survived him by a full 40 years, but when she finally passed away she was buried alongside her troubled partner.
10Montmartre cemetery, Paris
The family that gets buried together, stays together. For all eternity. We’ll never know the full extent of what the world lost when Lili Boulanger’s life was tragically cut short at 24, though her sister Nadia’s influence as a composer and teacher is incalculable. When she died over 60 years after her sister, she was interred in the same tomb as Lili and both their parents at Montmartre cemetery. Similarly, both of Hector Berlioz’ wives were exhumed in order to be interred next to him at Montmartre. Jacques Offenbach is also buried here, and it’s a good one for art buffs too: Edgar Degas and Francis Picabia can be found amongst the gravestones.