A halo descends on select groups of people. Assassinated presidents, for example: to be sure, Lincoln and JFK deserve theirs, albeit for different reasons. But it’s harder to remember much about Garfield or McKinley except for their having been abruptly removed from office by an individual with an agenda. Their haloes are a bit thinner and dimmer, I suppose.
A special pride of place goes to those composers who died before reaching 40, alas never flamboyantly at the hands of assassins or hired hit-men, boiled in a cannibal’s stewpot, or chopped down while battling insurgents in the Guatemalan jungles, but prosaically instead from disease or the like. They are a mixed-bag lot, but among them one finds some of the most cherished creators in Western music. But let there be an end to those sad old-wives’ tales about artists wasting away young in icy garrets, suffering for their art and for humanity. Composers, taken as a whole, tended to live longer than the general population. For every Mozart there are a dozen Vanhals, all strutting along into their seventh and even eighth decades.
But it does seem as though more composers started dropping dead ahead of schedule around the Viennese Classical era onwards. It makes sense; the early Industrial Revolution was a dreadfully disease-ridden time, as folks flocked into cities that lacked the sanitation measures to protect them. Composers tended to live in cities, after all. Smallpox, typhoid, and cholera were constant companions to city folk from the late eighteenth-century onwards, sometimes extending their deadly tentacles into the countryside as well. Consider Dickens’s description of the dank London slum Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House:
The smallpox that slashes through the last third of Bleak House is a product of Tom-all-Alone’s, brought to Esther Summerson & Co. by street urchin Jo, whom they are trying to protect. Tuberculosis—still a serious problem as late as the 1930s and nowadays showing signs of a resurgence due to antibiotic-resistant pathogens—was a running leitmotif throughout music history. The fragile courtesan of La Traviata suffered from it, albeit under the more decorous name of "consumption".
Tuberculosis alone carried off Henry Purcell (probably), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (definitely), and Carl Maria von Weber (ditto). Although tuberculosis has been traditionally accepted without question as Chopin’s fatal ailment, in 2008 some researchers floated the possibility of cystic fibrosis instead. Nobody questions Chopin’s actually having tuberculosis, however; without a shadow of a doubt, he did.
It’s a bit surprising that more composers didn’t drop dead of venereal disease—many of them were hardly paragons of virtue. But of the dead-by-40 crowd, only Franz Schubert fits the bill, and in his case the official cause of death was typhoid fever; we can throw in a solid dose of mercury poisoning as well, just to pile up the woes. Fleeting evidence hints that Schubert may have practiced a pretty louche lifestyle, and like those carefree young men of early 1980s San Francisco who ignored the clear evidence of the mounting AIDS crisis all around them, he more or less threw himself under the bus.
Coronary infarctions were sure to cut people down, just as they continue to do today despite a series of stunning advances such as angioplasty procedures, stents, and cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. But coronary trouble usually develops later in life—it carried Wagner away a few months before his 70th birthday, for example. Georges Bizet died of a heart attack, however, at the tender age of 37. That’s incredibly young to have developed the kinds of arterial problems that lead to heart attacks, but such can happen even today. Bizet died shortly after strenuous swimming, and if he had a partially-blocked coronary artery, a rupture in the plaque lining the artery could have easily resulted in an arterial blood clot. The doctor responded by putting hot poultices on his chest, about as effective a treatment for a coronary occlusion as sacrificing a goat on a horned altar. Given that Bizet had complained of angina pectoris, a common symptom of arterial blockage, the common diagnosis of heart attack seems more likely than an acute streptococcal infection, although that latter cannot be altogether ruled out. He undoubtedly had such an infection at the time of his death.
Felix Mendelssohn was another victim of a cardiovascular incident, in his case a cerebral aneurysm—i.e., a weakness in an arterial wall that can lead to a rupture and hemorrhage. In some cases, ruptures heal themselves and the individuals affected go on to live normal lives. Increasing severity results in various levels of impairment, with death at the far end. Even fairly modest ruptures can have a catastrophic impact; at age 49 my mother suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage that left the entire right side of her body paralyzed; she recovered only partly and died five years later. It would seem that such problems ran in Felix’s family, and the rupture that felled him at age 38 was probably not his first one.
George Gershwin’s disease was one of the saddest and scariest: a brain tumor took him away at the age of 38. If the tumor was indeed a glioblastoma multiforme as originally diagnosed, then modern medicine couldn’t save him any more than the best efforts of 1937 surgeons and physicians.
I add Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas to my list, even though he made it to age 40, if barely. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but in Revueltas’s case, the real problem was severe alcoholism. When one has become a booze-soaked wreck, it isn’t so much of matter of what is going to kill you, but when—usually pretty soon. I still mourn a brilliant young SFCM bassoonist who had become a severe alcoholic, more or less without anybody’s knowing about it. She passed away in her twenties from an acute systemic infection, treatable had she sought help instead of wandering around in a boozy haze.
No, I haven’t forgotten about Mozart. His death is the most difficult to understand, given the primitive state of medicine at the time, not to mention all those contradictory statements from folks who were there. Certainly he was not poisoned, neither by Antonio Salieri nor anybody else. An entire chapter in Robbins Landon’s "1791: Mozart’s Last Year" is devoted to the subject, in fact. Kidney trouble always seems to hover around any attempts to decipher the problem, exacerbated by a recent streptococcal infection after a long history of infections. Acute rheumatic fever remains another commonly-encountered villian. Finally, just to keep the blame game running along, the doctors themselves may have been at least partly responsible.