Caruso once commented to his wife: Tenors die sometimes on the stage after big note, from hemorrhage.Anton Cajetan Adlgasser (1729-77) was organist at Salzburg Cathedral, holding this post until his death: suffering a stroke while playing. It was feared that his temporary replacement, Michael Haydn, was also suffering the same fate, instead it was found that his unsteady performance was due to his being drunk.
Thomas Baker born at Florence in 1850,
known as “Federici”, was a gifted and popular bass-baritone.
On March 3, 1888, at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, he was the singing Mephistopheles in Gounod's opera ‘Faust’.
The opera ends with Mephistopheles sinking dramatically through a trapdoor returning to the fires of hell with Dr Faustus.
As Federici was lowered down through the stage to “the fires of hell”, he suffered a fatal heart.
The cast, when later told of his death, replied: ‘but he was onstage just now taking his bows with us’.
His ghost still haunts the Princess Theatre to this day.
Myths and legends abound regarding his ghost, the funeral etc.
They are dealt with more fully
here.
Simon Barere (1896–1951) a Jewish-born, Russian-American pianist,
played annual recitals in Carnegie Hall, often with an audience consisting of many of the foremost pianists in the world.
Barere died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage during a performance of Grieg’s Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall,
Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Pagliacci has a strange and foreboding history.
On 8 December, 1920, the great Enrico Caruso had just finished his Vesti la giubba.
As he reached the edge of the curtain, he fell unconscious into the arms of his secretary,
and was then carried to the dressing room.
He sang just five more performances, and dying in Italy 2 August, 1921.
Nelson Ackerman Eddy (1901-1967) is best remembered for the films with Jeanette MacDonald,
but he also sang in opera, on the concert stage, in radio, television, and nightclubs.
In March 1967, Eddy was singing at the Sans Souci Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida,
when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on stage, dying a few hours later.
Similarly, Swedish tenor Aroldo Lindi (born Gustav Harold Lindau) died in San Francisco in 1944 at the end of act one of Pagliacci.
As he was singing the famous Vesti la giubba, he dropped to the floor.
The audience applauded his realism as the curtain came down.
However, as the curtain rose again, Lindi was still lying on the stage, dead from a heart attack!
His co-star of the night, Coe Glade
gives long account of the event.
Miriam Makeba, often referred to as Mama Afrika (1932-2008)
was a South African singer,civil rights activist winning the Grammy Award.
On November 2008, she became ill while taking part in a concert organized to support writer Roberto Saviano
in his stand against the Camorra.
The concert was being held in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy.
Makeba suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song “Pata Pata”, and was taken to the
Pineta Grande clinic where doctors were unable to revive her.
Three weeks before taking up a new contract with the Metropolitan opera in New York, replacing Caruso,
Polish born tenor Thomas Mann (1879-1921),
succumbed to a heart attack while performing Aida in Berlin.
Felix Robert Mendelssohn, (1896-1951),
German-American cellist, and a great-grand-nephew of the famous composer
whilst playing Dohnanyi’s Konzertstück in Baltimore.
Shostakovich was inspired by Tatiana Nikolayeva’s performance
of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues at the Leipzig Piano Competition in 1950, part of the bicentennial marking Bach’s death.
He composed his own 24 Preludes and Fugues especially for her.
She died whilst performing them at a concert in San Francisco on 13 November 1994.
Vaclav (Wenceslas) Pichl (1741-1805),
who is remembered for his concerto for the double-bass, and occasionally for some solo violin pieces,
died suddenly while performing a violin concerto at Prince Lobkiwitz’s palace.
Was it a critical colleague, an irate employer or a higher authority?
Bear in mind, it was immediately after the French Revolution!
Americo Sbigoli (died January 1822) was an Italian tenor.
He is best known for the unusual manner of his death, as documented by the composer Giovanni Pacini.
Singing the second tenor part in a performance of Pacini’s opera Cesare in Egitto,
Sbigoli took part in a vocal quintet with first tenor Domenico Donzelli.
In the course of the quintet, Sbigoli's character was to sing a phrase
“closely resembling one sung just previously by Donzelli”.
Attempting to match Donzelli’s powerful voice, Sbigoli overstrained himself,
burst a blood vessel in his neck, and died shortly thereafter.
Sylvia Syms (1917-1992) was an American jazz singer.
She died on stage at the Algonquin Hotel in New York from a heart attack, aged 74.
American singer, ukulele player, and musical archivist Herbert Khaury (1932–1996), aka Tiny Tim,
was most famous for his rendition of Tiptoe Through the Tulips sung in a distinctive high falsetto.
In September 1996, he suffered a heart attack as he began singing at a ukulele festival at Montague, Massachusetts.
Hospitalized for three weeks, he was discharged with strong admonitions to cease performing due to his fragile health.
But he continued to give concerts.
While playing Tiptoe Through the Tulips at a Gala Benefit, he suffered another heart attack on stage,
collapsing, and dying soon after.
Richard Versalle (1932–1996), American tenor,
died while singing in a performance of Janácek’s The Makropulos Case at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
He was singing Vitek (an elderly law clerk) in what was to have been the Met’s premiere of the opera.
Just a few minutes into the performance and after singing “You can only live so long”
while halfway up a 6-meter ladder, he suffered a fatal heart attack, amd fell onto the stage.
The blind French organist Louis Vierne
suffered a stroke and died at the organ of Notre-Dame-de-Paris during his 1,750th organ recital.
It was to be have been his last, as the cathedral authorities were stopping recitals altogether at Notre Dame.
Maurice Duruflé played the rest of Vierne’s programme.
American baritone Leonard Warren (born Leonard Warenoff)
to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Warren was first employed in his father's fur business.
He collapsed from a stroke, on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera during a performance of Verdi’s
La Forza del Destino on March 4, 1960.
He died backstage soon afterwards.
Appropriately, he was singing Urna fatale del mio destino (Fatal box of my destiny).
Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski
suffered a heart attack during a concert in Berlin in 1874, when aged about 42.
He survived, giving further concerts, eventually succumbing in Moscow, aged 44.