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How They Died If you live in the temperate zone of the Northern
Hemisphere, the world is getting colder, the days are getting shorter, the trees
will soon be nude and scraggly looking, and all manner of scary things that
might happen will begin to seem more likely to happen. Maybe they were just
waiting for the darkness to happen in. What was that? The sound behind you. Didn’t you hear it? Ok, well, I heard it. You might want to be prepared. It
sounded a little creepy. Just saying. Anyway, where was I? ….there it is again. Well, with whatever time you’ve got left, let’s share a
story about some great composers and their not-so-great demises. The way they
died. That’s what this season of fear is all about, isn’t it? All things
horrible and …possibly fatal. Like lung cancer, but in a much more immediate
sense. Funny, I don’t know any composers who died of lung cancer.
It’s probably happened, though. Let’s start with something truly horrifying. Composer
Enrique Granados. Granados had just been wined and dined and honored at the
White House, and was delayed a day on his way back to Spain so he had to take an
alternate route when he missed his ship. The year was 1916 and Europe was in the
midst of the First World War. The ship he took across the English Channel was
sunk by a German U-boat. The composer got on a life raft but saw his wife
struggling in the water some yards away and rushed out to save her. She couldn’t
swim. Sadly, he couldn’t swim either. They both drowned. There are some composers who favor the slower, but no less
inexorable approach of death. Jean-Baptiste Lully was one of those guys. In the
days before conductors wielded batons, Lully was keeping time with a long pole
which he beat on the floor. In an excess of enthusiasm, or bile, he managed to
stab himself in the foot, and later die of gangrene. Nobody seemed too broken up
about this because Lully was pretty much a jerk. Of course, you might expect
such a story to be more gossip than history, but apparently this story is true. One more likely
to be a legend is the strange death of the 19th French composer
Alkan. The story is that while in his apartment, reaching for a copy of the
Talmud on a high shelf, the bookcase came down on him and killed him. Not only
would that appear to involve an especially heavy bookcase, loaded with
particularly heavy books, but the idea that it was his Talmudic studies that did
him in suggests there may be anti-Semitic bile behind this one. You would expect some historical exaggeration behind some of
these stories and you would be right. Of the greatest members of the pantheon,
few met with any particularly violent or strange ends, though often the exact
cause of their deaths is a mystery, mostly because medical knowledge at that
point did not know what to diagnose. Some have attempted to retroactively
diagnose causes of death. For instance, Mozart is likely to have died of Rheumatic
Fever, and it didn’t help that his liver was pretty much shot from heavy
drinking and that Syphilis was treated with Mercury in those days. That little STD may or may not figure in the early death of
Schubert as well. Of course, what you remember about Mozart is how the black
masked man pretty much worked and/or scared him to death writing a Requiem which
turned out to be for himself. That, remember is a movie. It is not history, it
is drama. The truth, interestingly, does involve a Requiem mass which Mozart DID
leave unfinished, and which was commissioned by an unknown person. That unknown
person was a count who liked to pass off the compositions of others as his own.
The legend of the mysterious stranger started soon after Mozart’s death,
supposedly as related by his wife to her second husband, who wrote a biography
of the composer and included the fantastic tale (which was further embroidered
for the movie Amadeus). All things considered, it is the strangest tale of the death
of a famous composer, even if it isn’t quite as sensational as it later turned
out to be (!) Oh, and the weather in Vienna was fine the day of his funeral.
Somebody looked up the weather report for that day and busted another legend. Beethoven was also said to have died during a thunderstorm,
shaking his first at the heavens. Brahms, on the other hand, died of cancer. While we are separating truth from fiction, it is true that
Schumann threw himself off a bridge into a river in a suicide attempt and spent
the last three years of his life in an insane asylum. After him, genius and
madness were never allowed to travel apart; the public insisted upon one being
the price for the other. The genius of our unfortunate composers having risen
dramatic ally in the last several paragraphs, let us allow another, far less gifted,
to slip in. For sensationalism, you simply can’t beat the death of Franz Kotzwara, composer of The Battle of Prague, the very silly concatenation I
played in recital last spring. I will say only that it involved a prostitute and
asphyxiation. For details you can look elsewhere. In an attempt to salvage our standards as regards the
deceased, while still allowing a certain amount of public interest, one should
note that both Bach and Handel were near blindness late in life (probably from
too much candlelight composing) and were both operated upon by the same scary
quack doctor, who left them completely blind. Their actual deaths, though, were
the usual decline and fall. Back to the
French composers. 20th center Pierre Cochereau died of a brain
hemorrhage two days after Easter. Marcel Dupre died on Pentecost; I am not sure
of what. I just know to be careful on high holy days. The Reaper is watching
church organists. This little cemetery is of course not exhaustive; it only
involves composers whose deaths the author happens to remember off the top of
his head. Finally, there is the terrifying death of Camille
Saint-Saens, composer of the Danse Macabre and other symphonic poems suitable
for bedtime . On the morning of his death, he put in a couple hours of piano
practice, lay down on the couch to take a nap, and never woke up. That is the most awful of all for two reasons. It compounds
the sadness of his passing with the tragedy of his not even getting a good story
to go out on, and it reminds us that we, too, could pass from this mortal vale
at anytime, anywhere, simply by laying down on a couch. And not waking up again. Scared? Happy Halloween.
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