The death of internationally renowned orchestra conductor Israel Yinon in January 2015 sent shockwaves through the music world. It was seen by many as inexplicable. How could such an energetic, seemingly healthy maestro die suddenly at the relatively young age of fifty-nine—in the middle of a performance?
Yinon, who happened to be an Israeli but who lived in Berlin, was known for his intensity and youthfulness. With his Peppermint Patty mop of hair, he was an enthusiastic performer, often wearing the ill-fitting jacket of a classic film comedian. He was sought the world over as a guest conductor, with a selection of material that elevated his status to that of a noble cause.
Yinon made it his specialty and mission to revive works of forgotten German composers who were banned under Adolf Hitler. Thanks to Yinon, modern audiences got to hear compositions by composers like Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, and Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann, who went to the Auschwitz gas chambers.
On Thursday evening, January 29, 2015, the globe-trotting orchestra leader was at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, conducting the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra of Central Switzerland. The group was performing An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss. Yinon was just arriving at the point where the music reaches the mountain summit when he suddenly collapsed. People in the first row saw him tumble off the conductor’s platform and hit the floor headfirst. The sound of music was replaced by the piercing screams of musicians and audience members alike.
Serious head injury now compounded whatever ailment caused Israel Yinon to drop. An audience member climbed over to try and help him, as the musicians, who included Yinon’s girlfriend, left the stage. The rest of the audience was asked to leave the hall. Israel Yinon was pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
The Swiss media would later point out that the title of his last concert was somewhat ironic: The Healing Alps.
Israel Yinon’s untimely passing led almost immediately to questions about what could have killed him. One would think that the art of conducting an orchestra—standing on a raised podium, waving around a ten- to twenty-four-inch stick, setting the tempo, bringing in various instruments, and gesturing, signaling, and communicating with the musicians to shape the phrasing of a symphony—would provide hours of aerobic activity and mental stimulation and be one of the least hazardous occupations in the world.
One would be wrong. Conductors’ deaths onstage have prompted health studies, warnings from experts, and, according to leading music and cultural affairs commentator Norman Lebrecht, macabre speculation among maestros “as to whether they were more likely to die in fast or slow passages.” Lebrecht made the observation in April 2001, in a column in London’s Daily Telegraph titled “Why Conducting Is a Health Hazard.” He ran through the details surrounding the onstage deaths of conductors he’d counted. Most were in their fifties or sixties. Two were smokers. One was a heavy drinker. One had a genetic predisposition to heart disease. “Their peripatetic, late-night concert lives did not facilitate a low-cholesterol diet,” he wrote. “There are ticks in every negative box of their health profiles.” The modern conductor, who spends time waiting in airports, flying between engagements, maintaining long-distance relationships with various orchestras, and arranging recording contracts and sessions, is certainly in the high-risk group.
Lebrecht’s quick study was prompted by the literal fall six days earlier of the towering, fiery, larger-than-life conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli. Sinopoli had returned to conduct at the Deutsche Opera in Berlin on April 20, 2001. It was the first time he’d set foot in the place since he stormed out in 1990, after a fight with its general director, Götz Friedrich.
After nine years of a bitter cold war, Friedrich flew to Rome to make peace, and Sinopoli agreed to conduct Verdi’s Aida in Berlin, in the spirit of renewed friendship. After Friedrich died of cancer in December 2000, it was decided that the premiere performance would go on, only now in Friedrich’s memory. With his bushy hair, beard, and rimless glasses, Sinopoli was instantly recognizable as he made his entrance, and Berlin’s cultural elite greeted him with a warm ovation. It was during the third act, around 10:00 PM, that Sinopoli dropped. In the words of a financier in the second row, “He just went down like a tree.” Sinopoli was pronounced dead of a heart attack at fifty-four.
Two nights later, Swiss conductor Marcello Viotti stepped in to conduct Aida. He dedicated his performance to the memory of Giuseppe Sinopoli. On February 9, 2005, Viotti would suffer a stroke while rehearsing with the Munich Radio Orchestra. He remained in a coma until he died a week later, on February 16. He was fifty.
Early in his career, Viotti had been assistant to conductor Giuseppe Patanè. Patanè collapsed without warning at the podium of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich on May 29, 1989, while American baritone Thomas Hampson was singing Il barbiere di Siviglia (“The Barber of Seville”). He was dead of a heart attack at fifty-seven. (Hampson witnessed Sinopoli’s fall from the second row.)
Lebrecht counted at least nine conductors who died at work. We found more, which points to the conclusion that orchestra conducting may be the most dangerous occupation in show business:
Narcisse Girard collapsed on January 17, 1860, while conducting the Orchestra de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire at the Paris Opéra. He was sixty-two.
Felix Josef von Mottl collapsed at the podium of Munich’s Royal Opera House on June 21, 1911, while conducting the one hundredth performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He suffered a heart attack at the very moment his mistress Zdenka Fassbender, portraying Isolde, belted out the words “Death-doomed head, death-doomed heart.” Mottl married her on his deathbed two days later. He passed away on July 2, at fifty-four.
Albert Stoessel, a maestro from St. Louis, suffered a heart attack on the afternoon of May 12, 1943, while conducting fifteen members of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera baritone Hugh Thompson in the American Academy of Arts and Letters auditorium in Manhattan. There was a doctor in the house, but by the time he reached Stoessel, he was already dead. He was forty-eight.
Gaetano Merola, founder of the San Francisco Opera, was in failing health and had turned over many of his duties as director by August 30, 1953, when he dropped dead while conducting an excerpt from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at a free outdoor concert at the city’s Sigmund Stern Grove amphitheater. He was seventy-two.
Good Friday 1956 turned out to be a particularly bad Friday for Fritz Lehmann. The fifty-one-year-old German was conducting Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Munich on March 30 when he collapsed from a heart attack during the intermission.
Eduard van Beinum, chief conductor at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, was rehearsing the first two movements of Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 on April 13, 1959, when he told the musicians he needed a break. Before he could leave the podium, van Beinum slid from the conductor’s seat to the floor, dead of a massive heart attack at fifty-eight.
Jesús Arámbarri Gárate conducted the Banda Sinfónica de Madrid outdoors in the Parque del Buen Retiro on July 11, 1960. In the second half of the concert, he had a heart attack during the overture to Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo. He, too, was fifty-eight.
Dimitri Mitropoulos, the Greek conductor who was Leonard Bernstein’s predecessor at the New York Philharmonic (and—described as “quietly known to be homosexual”—once Bernstein’s lover) died in Milan, Italy, on November 2, 1960. He was sixty-four. Mitropoulos suffered a heart attack while rehearsing Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony. Norman Lebrecht writes that the second bassoonist drew a cross in his score at the eighty-sixth bar and noted, “In questa misura e morto il Maestro Mitropoulos.” (“Maestro Mitropoulos made it to here and died.”)
A heart attack killed Franz Konwitschny, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, on July 28, 1962, during a recording session in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The sixty-year-old maestro was such a boozer that his nickname was “Kon-whisky.”
The curse of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (divorce, deaths, wars, and bad reviews) struck again on July 20, 1968, during the same act, in the same opera house, and at the same podium where Felix von Mottl fell. Joseph Keilberth tumbled to the floor moments after conducting Tristan’s line “Let me die, never to awake.” He was fifty-nine.
Franco Capuana, younger brother of mezzo-soprano Maria Capuana, was in the middle of Gioachino Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, when he died on the podium on December 10, 1969. He made it to seventy-five.
Benjamin S. Chancy, music director of the New York City school system, conducted the All-City High School Orchestra and Choral Concert at Philharmonic Hall on May 5, 1971. He was about to walk onstage just before 9:00 PM to conduct excerpts from Swan Lake when a heart attack knocked him to the floor. Dr. Paul Beck, a family friend and gynecologist, rushed from the audience but failed to revive him. Chancy was sixty-two.
Fausto Cleva spent twenty years as an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera before making his official conducting debut in February 1942. His heart gave out in Athens on August 6, 1971, while conducting Christoph Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. He was sixty-nine.
Polish conductor Paul Kletzki was in Liverpool, England, for a concert with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on the evening of March 5, 1973. While rehearsing the orchestra that afternoon, the former conductor of the Dallas Symphony dropped from a heart attack. He died that night in a hospital at age seventy-two.
High school band conductor Carl Barnett died of a heart attack on April 23, 1974, while conducting at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Carl was fifty-nine. He gets a mention because he died during Johann Sebastian Bach’s Come, Sweet Death.
Latvian conductor Arvīds Jansons collapsed while conducting the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England, on November 21, 1984. He was dead of a heart attack at seventy. (Arvīds Jansons’s son, Mariss Jansons, a renowned conductor in his own right, suffered a massive heart attack at fifty-three, while leading the Oslo Philharmonic in the Oslo Concert House on April 25, 1996. He survived.)
Dominican orchestra conductor Billo Frómeta suffered a stroke at the podium in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 27, 1988. He was rehearsing with the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra for a tribute concert in his honor the following day. He died on May 5, at seventy-two.
Jean-Marc Cochereau was rehearsing the Orléans Symphony in Northern France on January 10, 2011, when he buckled and collapsed during the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. His death from cardiac arrest occurred moments before he was to lead the orchestra through the “Funeral March.” Cochereau was sixty-one.
Vincent C. LaGuardia Jr. died of a heart attack on March 9, 2012, while conducting the Arapahoe Philharmonic’s second-to-last concert of the season at Mission Hills Church in Littleton, Colorado. He was two-thirds of the way through the first number, J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, when he suddenly leaned forward and slammed face-first to the floor. Tracy LaGuardia, his wife of twenty-five years, was playing lead violin. “It happened so fast,” she told the Denver Post. “He always said that’s the way he wanted to go.”
Swiss maestro Carl Robert Helg took a break from orchestra and choir rehearsal at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany, on July 23, 2011. He climbed up to a lighting catwalk, ostensibly to get a better view of the positioning of his choir on the stage. Then he fell to the stage, landing hard in front of the entire company. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. Police speculated it may have been suicide. Helg’s contract was to expire at the end of the season, and insiders said that he’d suffered from severe depression.
Surely, that last scenario fits in with the health risks associated with what appears to be not only the most dangerous but the deadliest occupation in show business.