George Wilfred Alwis (1911-1962) was born to a Christian family in Sri Lanka.
After studying art in India and simultaneously embracing Buddhism, Alwis changed his name to Ananda Samarakone.
Returning to Sri Lanka he endeavoured to create a musical tradition for the Sri Lankan people.
Samarakone committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Henry Carey (c. 1687 - 1743).
English poet, playwright, and musician chiefly remembered for his ballads, especially Sally in Our Alley.
Despite the popularity of his work, Carey suffered great poverty, as his works were widely pirated by unscrupulous printers.
Carey was reputed to be the illegitimate son of George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax.
It is now suggested that he was Savile’s illegitimate grandson.
Heavily in debt, Carey committed suicide by hanging.
His son claimed that Carey was the author of God Save the Queen but this remains unproven.
Edwin Pearce Christy (1815–1862),
more commonly known as E. P. Christy, and was the founder of the blackface minstrel group Christy’s Minstrels.
Some of Stephen Foster’s songs were written for Christy, who for a time, appropriated them as his own.
Fearful of financial reverses due to the upheaval of the American Civil War, and becoming mentally deranged,
Christy committed suicide by jumping from a window of his house.
Frank Churchill (1901-1942), composer of popular music for films,
he wrote most of the music for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs including Whistle While You Work.
He was supervisor of music at Disney, winning Oscar nominations for his work on Dumbo and Bambi.
He committed suicide on May 14, 1942.
Jeremiah Clarke (c.1673-1707) became mentally deranged as the result of a hopeless love affair and shot himself.
Claude Debussy’s wife shot herself when he eloped with his mistress.
When she (the mistress) was likewise abandoned, she also attempted suicide.
Talented German composer Hugo Distler,
horrified at the Nazi régime, gassed himself in Berlin in 1942, aged 34.
More on Distler.
Madame Emblad (once accompanist to the young Melba) quarrelled with her husband in Prague,
took a pistol from her pocket and blew her brains out.
Parisien violinist and composer Louis-Gabriel Guillemain (1705-1770),
Ordinaire de la Musique du Roi (Musician by appointment to the King),
was a student of Giovanni Battista Somis and Jean-Marie Leclair.
He was one of the first French composers to write sonatas with a developed accompaniment.
On his way to Versailles, he stabbed himself with a knife fourteen times and died.
Philip Heseltine (the pseudonym of Peter Warlock) was involved in black magic, hence the pseudonym.
Suffering from depression, in 1930 he committed suicide by gas in his London flat.
Arthur Eaglefield Hull, (1876-1928), a British writer on music.
In 1927 Hull published a book called Music, Classical Romantic & Modern,
which proved to be a pastiche of borrowings from English & American writers,
which of course was noticed by many reviewers.
The book was withdrawn by the publishers in 1928.
This lead directly to Hull’s suicide: he threw himself under a train at Huddersfield railway station,
dying soon afterwards from his injuries.
American composer Jerry Hunt (1943-1993) created works using live electronics
partly controlled by his ritualistic performance techniques, as he was greatly influenced by the occult.
He chose to commit suicide in response to what would have otherwise been a fatal cancer.
The young pianist, Terrence Judd, a 22-year-old English prodigy,
was found dead at the foot of Beachy Head in Sussex,
notorious as a popular location for people to commit suicide.
Zinaida Jurjevskaya (1896-1925) was on the verge of making a great career,
when on a visit to Andermatt in Switzerland she threw herself into a mountain river and drowned.
It was said that she was overcome by an unrequited passion for another soprano.
American pianist Alexander Kelberine (1903-40) was a victim of acute depression.
He programmed his last recital with pieces in minor keys and with funereal connotations,
ending with Liszt’s Totentanz.
He then went home and took an overdose of sleeping pills.
Johann Baptist Krumpholtz (1742-1790), Bohemian harp virtuoso, was for a while, harpist in Haydn’s orchestra at Erstaházy.
He invented a harp with two pedals, one loud, one soft.
He married Fraülen Meyer, a 16 year-old harpist, with whom he subsequently gave many concerts.
His life ended tragically when he drowned himself in the Seine after she eloped to England with another man.
Zuan de Leze, an illegitimate son of the Lord Lieutenant of Cyprus,
tried out for a position as a harpsichordist in England before Henry VIII.
His performance did not meet with Henry’s approval and, disappointed, he hanged himself.
This reaction to failing an audition has fortunately never become popular.
The French french horn virtuoso Jean Lebrun (1759-1809) returned to Paris after
extended tours of England and Germany.
In Paris having found no employment, in despair, he committed suicide.
Lebrun invented the mute.
English pianist and musicologist Denis Matthews (1919–1988) took his life on December 25th 1988
Richard Maxfield (1927–1969) was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music.
A student of Milton Babbitt, influenced by John Cage, he worked with Lamonte Young.
Maxfield had a long history of psychoactive drug use and, in a drug-induced state, ended his life by jumping out of a window.
Record producer Joe Meek, (1929-67),
was acclaimed by many as Britain’s “Phil Spector”.
Meek had built his own recording studio in his flat above a shop in the Holloway Road in North London.
He produced hits for Lonnie Donegan, The Honeycombs, John Leyton, and Mike Berry.
His greatest success was Telstar for The Tornados.
He was found dead on February 3 1967, a bullet in his head, at his home studio.
After shooting his landlady he had turned the gun on himself.
Noel Mewton-Wood (1922–1953) was an Australian-born concert pianist.
At the age of thirty-one, he committed suicide by drinking prussic acid,
depressed and apparently blaming himself over the death of his (gay) lover.
Robin Milford (1903-1959), the son a publisher with Oxford University Press,
realising he would not be able to make a living solely as a composer, worked for a time correcting pianola rolls.
After war service, he suffered depression after the death of his young son in a road accident, and several times attempted suicide.
The deaths of Finzi (1956) and Vaughan Williams (1958) affected him deeply.
He committed suicide by taking an overdose of aspirin in December of 1959.
David Munrow, recorder player and founder of The Early Music Consort of London
killed himself for ‘obscure reasons’ in 1976.
Oskar Nedbal
(1874–1930) was a Czech violist, composer, and conductor of classical music.
Because of mounting personal debts, Nedbal by jumped from a window of the Zagreb Opera House on Christmas eve, 1930.
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, better known as the emperor Nero,
was a singer and actor, usually accompanying himself on the lyre.
Performing his own poems, he won many competitions, particularly on his tour of Greece,
for who would dare to vote against the emperor, least of all, such a megalomaniac as Nero.
The most probable version of the popular story is that ‘Nero sang while Rome burned’.
Eventually, his mania became too much, even his palace guard (the Praetorian Guard) abandoned him,
the Senate condemning him to a slave’s death.
Nero fled Rome.
On seeing the rebels approaching, stabbing himself in the throat with a dagger.
His final words were: Qualis artifex pereo. (What an artist dies in me.)
Jakub Šimon Jan Ryba
(1765–1815) was a Czech teacher and composer.
An insufferable lack of money and the hostility of his superiors led him to suicide.
On April 8, 1815 Ryba attended morning mass. Later, he was found in a dense forest, his throat cut with a razor.
He had Essay on peace of soul by Seneca the Younger, his favourite author, at his side.
Rezsö Seress, a composer of Hungarian popular songs, playing piano and singing restaurants and nightclubs.
Seress came to fame as composer of the song Gloomy Sunday,
soon banned when its morbid tune precipitated a wave of Sunday suicides among the young.
Seress himself jumped from the 2nd floor window of his Budapest apartment on 8 January,
1968 (a Monday, not a Sunday), dying 4 days later.
Brian Sullivan (1918-69) performed as Peter Grimes in Britten’s eponymous opera,
was engaged to sing in Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung in Switzerland.
Apparently, Sullivan believed that he was contracted to star in the production but, in actuality,
was just the understudy to the star.
When he failed to find an opportunity to sing in the production,
Sullivan drowned himself, as did Peter Grimes, a case of Life Imitating Art.
After his disastrous marriage, presumably entered into to discuise his homosexuality,
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
attempted suicide by walking in the Moakva River in order to catch pneumonia,
but suffered nothing more severe than simple discomfort, a parallel with Schumann.
Years later Duke Senbok-Fermor, worried by the attention which Tchaikovsky was paying to his young nephew,
wrote a letter of accusation to the Tsar, handing a copy to one of Tchaikovsky’s colleagues.
If exposed as a homosexual, Tchaikovsky would face loss of all rights and exile to Siberia.
A court of honour was set up, and after much deliberation, Tchaikovsky came out, very pale and agitated.
They had reached a decision, by which Tchaikovsky had promised to abide.
They required that he kill himself. A few days later, news of his mortal illness started circulating.
An alternative view is expressed at
Wikipedia
where deliberate consumption of arsenic by Tchaikovsky is proposed.
The symptoms or arsenic poisoning and cholera having some similarity.
Czech Tomás Vačkář (1945-1963),
whose father and grand-father were also composers,
chose to end his life shortly after graduating from the Prague Conservatory, aged 18.
After the death of Tomás, Dalibor Vačkář, his father, composed pieces based on material found in the son's sketchbook.
Anastasia Vialtseva (1871-1931), an operetta and gypsy singer,
and one of the great charmeuses of the day.
She died by her own hand at the height of her fame after being rejected by her lover,
circumstances that seem about as remote from reality today as the scenarios of the operettas in which she sang.
Deon van der Walt,
died at the age of 47 in 2005 at his own vineyard in South Africa.
Apparently, he was shot twice in the chest by his father, who then committed suicide.
Van der Walt was a lyric tenor who sang in opera houses around the world
and a well-known figure in South African wine making.
He became the first South African singer to complete the operatic
grand slam by performing at the Met, La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, and Covent Garden.
The baritone Reinhold von Warlich
(1877-1939), a morose person, who sang all his songs in such a low tonality
that the accompanist Gerald Moore sat 15 cm to the left of the centre of the keyboard,
was so constantly talking of doing away with himself that Moore thought he never would.
Unfortunately Moore was wrong.
Jaromír Weinberger (1896-1967), composer of the opera Schwanda the Bagpiper,
suffering from cancer of the brain, money worries and neglect of his music,
took an overdose of sedatives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970),
whose music often showed somber characteristics.
Nevertheless, his depressive tendencies increased to a more physical level, compounded by a quickly deteriorating eye problem.
He took his life, just six months after the premier of his Requiem.