A story broke recently positing another theory about how the great Mozart met his tragically early end:
Strep throat may have killed Mozart (Reuters) The death of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 35 may have been caused by complications stemming from strep throat, according to a Dutch study published on Monday. Since the composer's death in 1791, there have been various theories about the cause of his untimely end, from intentional poisoning, to rheumatic fever, to trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by eating raw or undercooked pork. "Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that developed a deadly kidney complication," researcher Richard Zegers, of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Reuters Health.
This story tells us that Viennese medical historians have placed Mozart's time of death in the context of a strep throat epidemic that ravaged the Austrian capital during the winter of 1791. If the documentation's there, it's certainly plausible, but we'll never know for sure. Still, this intriguing tidbit got me thinking about some of the unusual - though all certainly tragic - ways composers have met their makers. Here are a few, to brighten your day: Jean-Baptiste Lully, the seventeenth-century Italian composer who spent most of his life as a composer in the court of France's Louis XIV, died of complications from an accident on the job. He was marking time with a wooden staff while leading the court orchestra and accidentally struck his toe. Gangrene set in. It spread. 22 march 1687: end of story. The twentieth-century atonal composer Anton Webern, a student of Arnold Schoenberg who, along with other Schoenberg students (including Alban Berg), adopted Schoenberg's atonal approach to composing music. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had the tremendous misfortune to be alive during World War II.  On the night of 15 September 1945, after curfew, Webern stepped out on his front porch in Allied-occupied Salzburg  for a smoke. An American soldier shot and killed him. The late-nineteenth-century French composer Ernest Chausson lost control of his bicycle as he was riding down a hill and crashed into a brick wall. He was laid to rest in Paris' Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where Georges Bizet, Vincenzo Bellini, Frederic Chopin (all but his heart, which is in his native Poland) and Francis Poulenc also, hopefully, rest in peace. In 1932 Maurice Ravel, the composer of Bolero, Daphnis et Chloe, and other delicious works, suffered a head injury in a taxi accident. For the rest of his life he experienced episodes of absent-mindedness and difficulty with his use of language. Eventually, he became unable to write down music he heard in his head. In 1937 he underwent experimental brain surgery, but fell into a coma not long after awakening from the surgery. He died on December 28 that year. My life is all the poorer for their deaths. But what a legacy they left behind!
