Gertrude Bindernagel (1894-1932) was a dramatic soprano with a mezzo quality. In Berlin after a performance of Siegfried in the autumn of 1932, as she was walking through the opera arcade, that her second husband, a banker, Wilhelm Hintze, shot her at point blank range; she died a few days later as a result of her injuries. At the trial it transpired that Hintze’s finances having suffered greatly from the economic uncertainty immediately before the Nazi’s took office, he imagined that there was a conspiracy afoot organised by his wife and her lover to ruin him. Not only was there no conspiracy, there was no lover!
“Belle Elmore” was the stage name of Cora Crippen; a mediocre theatrical singer originally from New York.
She had married Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, MD.
Belle had expensive tastes, diamonds, good clothes, flirted with men at parties, had a liking for alcohol, and nagged her hen-pecked husband.
He turned to his 28 year old secretary, Ethel Clara Le Neve.
Belle had apparently become aware of her husband’s philandering and threatened to leave him with nothing.
Crippen mixed nightshade in one of Belle’s drinks and there is evidence to suggest he shot her, to make sure.
Dr. Crippen then disembowlled his wife’s body, removing arms, legs and head before burying the body in the cellar floor.
Crippen then continued as if nothing ever happened, and later pretended that Belle had returned to America to tend an ill relative.
Cr. Crippen was hanged in Pentonville prison on 23 November 1910.
Gesualdo caught his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, savagely stabbing them. Being of the aristocracy, he avoided justice, and re-married.
Although he managed to survive the evening performance, Rumanian tenor
Trajan Grosavescu (1894-1927) died at the end of the night.
In Vienna on February 15th, 1927, the tenor’s wife burst into his dressing room and,
in a fit of jealous rage over an imagined affair, fatally shot him.
Jean-Marie Leclair was assassinated in his own house.
As no robbery was attempted and he was stabbed three times to the front of his body,
circumstances suggest that the murderer was known to him.
The mystery remains unsolved.
Suspects include his nephew, with whom he had recently quarreled, and Mme. Leclair,
who was also Leclair’s publisher and music-engraver.
Henry Purcell wrote his will on the day he died,
November 21, 1695, aged just 36.
There is tradition that his death was caused by a cold which he caught waiting for admittance to his own house.
His wife had instructed the servants not to let him in when he came home from the tavern after midnight.
The inclement weather caused the fatal disorder.
Composer Alessandro Stradella gave
singing lessons to the mistress of an important Venetian nobleman.
After several months, a great affection had grown between the two, decided to elope.
The nobleman, seeking revenge, sent a pair of notorious assassins after them.
On arriving in Rome, the assassins found that on the next day Stradella was to have an oratorio performed,
and they resolved to kill him as he made his way home afterwards.
However the enthusiasm of the audience for the music, and its affect on the would be assassins turned anger to piety,
and they agreed not to kill a man of such musical genius.
On his leaving the church, they complimented Stradella,
informed of their mission of murder, and advised him to flee the next day.
On another occasion, he became involved with a married lady, and the whole process was repeated,
this time less a fastidious murder was chosen, and Stradella was stabbed to death.
Flotow wrote an opera, Alessandro Stradella, based on his life.