ONE OF THE EARLIEST RECORDED onstage deaths in classical music was that of Anton Cajetan Adlgasser. Adlgasser was a German; a composer of liturgical music, oratorios, and orchestral and keyboard works; a friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (they collaborated on an oratorio); and, beginning in 1750, the organist at Salzburg Cathedral in Austria.
Adlgasser’s death on December 23, 1777, has been described as “dramatic.” He was playing the massive, ornate pipe organ at evening services when he suffered a stroke, fell over, and died at forty-eight.
His temporary replacement at the organ was Michael Haydn, younger brother of composer Joseph Haydn. When Michael Haydn first filled in, his performance was so shaky that panic began to spread through the cathedral. Many people feared that he, too, was having a stroke at the keyboards. It turned out that he was drunk.
It was a stroke of bad luck when Wenzel Pichl dropped dead on January 23, 1805, while performing a violin concerto in the Lobkowitz Palace in Vienna. He, too, suffered a stroke. In 1847, a stroke felled pianist Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel while she was rehearsing an oratorio by her brother, the legendary German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Felix died less than six months later, also from a stroke (strokes also killed both of their parents, as well as their grandfather Moses).
Death is a constant theme in some the greatest works of classical music, in suites, sonatas, symphonies, and, most obviously, its theatrical subgenre, opera. Opera, of course, inspired the modern proverb “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” The expression reminds us to never assume the conclusion to an event until it’s played out. The proverb has most often been tied to sporting events (its first recorded usage was in 1976, attributed to a Texas college sports official talking about a close basketball game), but the fat lady in question is clearly the zaftig soprano, most specifically the Valkyrie from Götterdämmerung, the last opera of Richard Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Brünnhilde, the big-boned gal with the horned helmet, spear, and shield, sings a twenty-minute aria that leads to the end of the opera, which turns out to be the end of the world.
So we can gather that while “It ain’t over til the fat lady sings” leaves open the possibility for a situation to change, once the fat lady has sung, it’s over. When a performer dies onstage, classical or otherwise, the fat lady has sung.
Simon Barere was known as a great if sometimes wild classical pianist who, according to Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Harold C. Schonberg, “sometimes let his remarkable fingers run away with him,” rushing through pieces and running roughshod over the score in his singularly brilliant fashion.
That appeared to be the case on April 2, 1951, when the Ukranian-born musician appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall. The concert was a benefit for the American-Scandinavian Foundation and was dedicated to the work of Scandinavian composers. Barere would, for the first time, perform Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. He’d be accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy.
“Mr. Ormandy,” Barere said to the maestro, in his last words before the concert began, “this is the first time that we are playing together. I hope it won’t be the last.” Ormandy conducted the opening number, then walked off stage. Following tradition, he returned, on the heels of pianist Barere.
Barere dashed to the piano, settled in, and waited for Ormandy’s downbeat. Barere seemed to be in top form through the thunderous introduction. He performed his solo brilliantly—until he began to speed up. “There he goes again,” thought more than a few aficionados in the audience, but as the musician barreled toward the passage where the violincellos announce the second theme, New York Times music critic Olin Downes realized something was amiss: “After a moment it seemed as if Mr. Barere were bending over to one side, listening with special attention to the instruments as he matched his time with theirs. In another moment, his left hand fell from the keyboard and in another second he fell senseless from the stool to the floor.”
Stop the music! The orchestra did. Someone onstage shouted for a doctor, and the unconscious pianist was carried offstage to a dressing room. It was decided that the show would go on. The Metropolitan’s Swedish tenor Set Svanholm was rushed onstage to sing a five-song cycle.
Meanwhile, word spread that Barere was backstage, recovering from a heart attack. In reality, Simon Barere was dead before Svanholm finished his third song. Three doctors, including his personal physician, attended to the fallen pianist. They used oxygen tanks and every other device that was available, to no avail. He never regained consciousness.
After intermission, Lithgow Osborne, chairman of the board of trustees for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, stepped onto the stage and asked the audience to rise. He announced that Simon Barere had died and that all the musicians agreed they should skip the final number and end the program.
Simon Barere was fifty-five. Wrote the Times critic, “His end was that of a great and modest musician, one of the leading interpreters of his day and it was not inglorious. Others might wish such a thrilling exit from life, while nobly making music. Mr. Barere was indeed at the height of his art when the summons came.”
Somewhat less glorious was the fact that Barere’s wife, Helen, and son, Boris, were in the audience to witness his death. After the body was taken away, Barere’s physician said he’d been treating the musician for high blood pressure for the past four years. Death was attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage.
Barere never got to hear his final recordings. His last studio session for Remington Records took place about a week before his death. With new, long-playing microgroove technology, it was hoped that Barere’s first commercial release in fifteen years would prove that he was one of the greatest pianists in the world. Instead, it was released as a memorial album.
Frederick Federici was an opera singer whose death was played out not only on the stage but also beneath it. Born Frederick Baker in Italy in 1850, he was a British baritone who gained a reputation in the earliest performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy Operas. From 1879 to 1887, he was the very model of a modern major Gilbert and Sullivan star, touring the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. He played, among other roles, the pirate king in the first performance of Pirates of Penzance, the title role in The Mikado, and Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore. In 1887 Federici and his wife moved to Australia to join J. C. Williamson’s theater company, which owned the rights to produce Gilbert and Sullivan operas and other works Down Under.
On Saturday night, March 3, 1888, Federici was at the grand Princess Theatre in Melbourne, starring as the demon Mephistopheles on opening night of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust. The 1,488-seat house was filled to capacity. Federici put on an energetic performance that showed no signs of lagging until the fourth and final act, when the conductor noticed his voice was wavering a bit.
The maestro wrote it off to fatigue until Federici missed one of his cues, coming in a bar and a half behind the orchestra and rushing ahead to catch up. Federici continued to struggle and had to brace himself to complete his, and the opera’s, final solo. He made it to his position over a trap door for the spectacular finale in which Mephistopheles carries Faust down into the smoke and fires of hell.
Jack Leumane, singing the role of Faust, knelt beside him as Federici sang the final words, “It might be.” A hidden choir sang a celestial chorus, and as an overhead limelight bathed them in red, the mechanical trap began to move. The twelve-by-thirty-inch platform descended, slowly, evenly, and on a slight angle so the men appeared to be sinking directly into the stage.
Federici kept a hand on Leumane’s shoulder for balance, but at that first movement of the trap, he swayed. His hand slipped off and he fell forward. Just as his shoulders cleared the floor of the stage on this dramatic descent into the underworld, Federici grabbed onto the boards. It was as if the demon had changed his mind and wanted to remain with the living. The trap continued its slow drop. Federici lost his grip and then his balance, and he tumbled off the trap, down into the darkness, taking Leumane with him.
The men dropped three feet and landed in a heap on the cellar floor. Leumane got up. Federici did not. Lights were brought over and four attendants worked to revive him from what they assumed was a fainting spell. When Federici didn’t regain consciousness, they carried him to a greenroom and laid him on a mattress and pillows. Someone commented that he appeared to be dead, but a messenger was sent to fetch Federici’s doctor.
When Dr. Willmott arrived, he knew what was wrong. He’d been treating Federici for heart disease and had been concerned that the five weeks of rehearsals and demands of the role might be too much for him. Federici had known as well that any performance might be his last, but he kept his condition a secret from the rest of the company. He had a small pocket sewn into each of his costumes to hold nitroglycerin pills to treat the symptoms.
The doctor detected a slight heartbeat, so in hopes of increasing it, he took out a galvanic battery to stimulate the heart with jolts of electricity. The charges were increasing when the patient died. Frederick Federici was thirty-seven, still dressed in his crimson costume and pointy shoes.
As all this commotion went on below, the rest of the cast of Faust was onstage, taking their bows before a rapturous cheering audience. None had any idea that Federici was dead in the greenroom. When they were told what had happened in the final moments of the opera, they were confused. How could he have died before the curtain call? They insisted they’d seen Federici onstage, taking the bows with them.
So began Frederick Federici’s second act, in the afterlife. Many sightings of Federici’s ghost have been reported at the Princess Theatre over the years. He’s been seen in full evening dress, sitting in the dress circle late at night during dress rehearsals, and as a shimmering light moving about the theater. For many years, a third-row seat in the dress circle was kept vacant in his honor on every opening night.
Another footnote comes from the unnamed journalist who reported on the “Shocking Occurrence at the Princess’s Theatre,” “an astonishing and melancholy incident,” for the following Monday’s edition of the Melbourne Argus. He also wrote of other “fatal theatre events” that the Federici tragedy brought to mind:
When the “Mystery of the Passion” was exhibited before John II of Sweden, the man who played the part of the centurion was so carried away by the reality of the scene that he drove his spear right into the body of the representative of the Redeemer, who fell dead upon the spot, crushing the person representing the Virgin Mary, who was kneeling at the foot of the cross. The King, infuriated by the spectacle, rushed upon the centurion and slew him with the sword, but the populace, siding with the victim of the Royal anger, fell upon the King and killed him.
Our research was unable to confirm that John II died in such a manner, but it seemed to be a story worth repeating.
The first time an opera singer died onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, the audience cheered! Most everyone on the evening of February 10, 1897, believed that the popular buffo (a male opera singer in a comedic role) Armand Castelmary was pulling off the performance of his life in Friedrich von Flotow’s romantic comic opera Martha. Dropping to his knees, clutching his hair, thudding to the boards as the curtain fell, no one realized the old ham’s heart had stopped at sixty-two.
There was no such confusion at the Met when Leonard Warren sang his last on the night of March 4, 1960. It was an evening that promised to be among the most memorable in the Metropolitan Opera’s entire history. A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino featured the return to the company of the prima donna soprano Renata Tebaldi, along with a superstar lineup of three of America’s greatest male opera singers: the bass Jerome Hines, tenor Richard Tucker, and, most celebrated of all, baritone Leonard Warren. A full house was already buzzing before the golden damask curtain was raised, and the audience erupted in applause and cheers after each of the arias and ensembles in the first act.
Warren was singing the role of Don Carlo. He entered in the second act, joining with Tucker in the duet “Solenne in quest’ora.” Witnesses said it was perfection, and it ended in a wash of bravos. Tucker stepped away, leaving Warren onstage alone to sing the recitative that begins “Morir! Tremenda cosa!” (“To die! What a tremendous thing!”) and the aria whose opening words are “Urna fatale del mio destino,” which translate to “Fatal urn of my destiny.” Warren was never in better form as he flowed smoothly across long legato phrases and flew and spun through cadenzas leading to climactic high notes. When he was done, he simply stood quietly and waited until the applause and shouts faded.
The scene continued as Roald Reitan, playing the surgeon, strode onstage to announce that Don Alvaro, Don Carlo’s fighting comrade, had been saved. Warren replied in song: “Oh gioia, oh gioia!” or “Oh joy, oh joy.”
With a portrait of his character’s sister in his hand, Warren turned to exit stage left. He stood at the right side of the stage next to a table set in an encampment near a battlefield. Then, the picture slipped from his hand, and Warren fell forward, as if he’d tripped. His face hit the floor. It was 9:55 PM (or 10:05 PM—more on that later).
Conductor Thomas Schippers stood with his arms outstretched, waiting for his cue to bring in the orchestra. Warren wasn’t moving. For a moment, no one was quite sure what had happened. Reitan moved quickly to the tenor, knelt by his side, and raised his head. Warren groaned something that sounded like “Help.” Then he went limp.
The audience only saw Reiten look desperately toward the conductor. Someone yelled, “Bring down the curtain!” As the curtain dropped, Tucker, Warren’s longtime friend, rushed over, calling, “Lennie! Lennie!” Lennie didn’t reply.
The Met’s doctor, Adrian Zorgniotti, was in the house. He rushed onstage, did a quick examination of Warren, and called for oxygen. While a supply was fetched from the Met’s first-aid room, fellow baritone Osie Hawkins and two other staffers applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A call was made for an ambulance and a police emergency truck with additional oxygen. Someone else put in a call to a replacement baritone, Mario Sereni, to get over to the opera house as quickly as possible.
All this activity took place onstage, behind the curtain. In front, the Met’s general manager Rudolph Bing walked out onto the stage and promised the audience that the performance would continue. A few minutes later, another staffer came on to announce an intermission until Sereni arrived.
Leonard Warren remained where he had fallen. His wife, Agathe, was by his side; she’d attended the performance and realized immediately that he hadn’t tripped. Msgr. Edwin Broderick of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, who’d also been in the audience, was now backstage to administer the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church (Warren was a convert).
Mrs. Warren was escorted off the stage and into a backstage office before Leonard Warren was pronounced dead at 10:28 PM. At 10:30, the house warning bells rang, and those audience members who’d left their seats—most hadn’t—filed back in to the auditorium. Bing stepped out onstage once more. The news was written on his face.
Let’s hold it there for a moment. There’s always been controversy surrounding the details of Leonard Warren’s death. The New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record, reported that he collapsed at 9:55 PM and that Bing announced, “This is one of the saddest nights in the history of the Metropolitan. May I ask you all to rise in memory of one of our greatest performers who died in the middle of one of his greatest performances. I am sure you will agree with me that it would not be possible to continue with the performance.”
The New York Herald Tribune, however, reported that Warren face-planted onto the stage at 10:05 PM and that after his death, Bing announced the following to the audience: “It is one of the saddest days. I ask you to stand in tribute to one of our greatest performers: he died as I am sure he would have wanted to die. He died in the middle of a performance. I’m sure you will agree that under these circumstances we cannot possibly continue.”
Which paper got it right? Herald Tribune reporter Sanche de Gramont (a Frenchman who’d later change his name to Ted Morgan) has the upper hand in this one. When the call came in that Leonard Warren had collapsed onstage, he ran from the paper’s rewrite desk at 230 West Forty-First Street to the Met, which occupied the entire west-side block of Broadway between Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Streets. He arrived in time to witness Bing’s 10:30 announcement and got the story written and cleared in time to make the late city edition at 11:30. His work would win him a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
The New York Times article, which hit the streets the next morning, carried the byline of respected music critic Howard Taubman. Taubman was seated in the audience with his wife, Nora, when the curtain rose. He would have had a ringside seat to the entire chain of events—if he hadn’t left the opera after the first act to write his review. When all hell broke loose, Howard Taubman was back at the Times, leaving schoolteacher Nora, a woman with no journalism experience beyond her long marriage to the critic, to observe, scribble notes, and phone her husband to give him her version of what he’d missed.
Leonard Warren had died of a cerebral vascular hemorrhage. The Times quoted Dr. Zorgniotti as saying, “Mr. Warren never knew what hit him.” He was forty-eight—though the Herald Tribune reported he was forty-nine.
Leonard Warren’s surprise exit marked the first and only time the Metropolitan Opera had canceled a show midperformance due to a death in the original opera house that opened on Broadway in 1883. The first death onstage at the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center occurred on January 5, 1996, opening night for the Met’s production of The Makropulos Case. Tenor Richard Versalle suffered a heart attack and fell from a ten-foot ladder onto his back after singing the line, “Too bad you can only live so long.” He was sixty-three.
William Bennett lived for the oboe. He studied the woodwind instrument at Yale University and the Juilliard School and joined the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra upon graduation in 1979. He was made the symphony’s principal oboist in 1987. When he wasn’t playing with the San Francisco Symphony, he was performing with the Berkeley Symphony across the bay or teaching the oboe at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
A genial, youthful man, quick with a joke and often cracking up his fellow musicians with his caricature sketches, Bill Bennett—everyone called him Bill—was regarded as one of the best oboists in the world. The critic from the San Francisco Chronicle hailed the lively, unpredictable twists he’d add to the most worn-out warhorse and called the musician “an artist of extraordinary skill and imagination” with “a distinctive tone that was both full-bodied and lyrical, and a ferocious technical ability.”
In 1992, Bill Bennett played the world premiere of composer John Harbison’s Oboe Concerto, which had been commissioned for him by the San Francisco Symphony. He toured with the music throughout the United States and Europe and, with the orchestra, recorded the concerto for Decca Records. Bennett told a Chronicle writer that he hoped Harbison’s concerto would “be a piece that young players would hear and say, ‘That’s a reason for learning this instrument,’ the way the Strauss concerto was for me.”
Bennett was referring to Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto—written by the German composer in 1945 and inspired by one of the US soldiers who commandeered his home at the end of World War II—which is considered the finest oboe concerto of the twentieth century. Despite the esteem in which Bennett held the piece, it would take another twenty years before he’d get a chance to perform the difficult work with the San Francisco Symphony. The opportunity was almost denied when, in 2004, he received a devastating diagnosis of tonsil cancer. Bennett left the symphony for radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Nine months later, in the summer of 2005, he was back, and he finally got to play the Strauss Oboe Concerto with the symphony in February 2013.
The Chronicle critic who reviewed the performance in Davies Symphony Hall wrote that the oboist “sounded as virtuosic and forthright as ever. He sailed through the technical challenges of the opening movement, and brought limpid purity of tone to the slow movement.” With reviews like that, the crowd that filled the hall on Saturday night, February 23, looked forward to Bennett’s star turn with an excitement that only true fans of classical music can know.
Bill Bennett walked to his place, stood before the orchestra, and began to play. As he produced the bright, powerful sound, he began to sway. He seemed to be getting lost in the music, but it was soon clear that Bennett was unsteady. He lost his balance and began to fall—but as he did, he fell in a way that no one who saw would ever forget. As his legs gave way, Bennett raised his arm and held his treasured oboe over his head, just long enough for a violinist to swoop in and grab the instrument before he hit the floor.
There is always bound to be at least one doctor in the house at a symphony performance, and on this night, a doctor was in the front row. He rushed to the stage and attended to the musician until paramedics arrived. At the hospital, Bennett was diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage. He never regained consciousness but hung on until Thursday, the last day of the month. William Bennett, oboist, was fifty-six.
Reporting on Bennett’s death, a blogger for WQXR, New York’s classical music radio station, noted that “oboe playing is known to put pressure on the cardiovascular system, as the performer must push a great deal of air through a small double reed. But while the profession is littered with stories of dizzy spells or fainting, evidence of any deeper medical effects is spotty and inconclusive.”