How They Died (tales
of the macabre mostly for Halloween)
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.
|