Beethoven's Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales From the World of Classical Music and Beyond

by Tim Rayborn

  Caccini, being rather nasty himself, learned of this and saw a way to get in good with Francesco I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany—and a very wealthy potential patron—namely, to squeal. Caccini undoubtedly thought that this false show of loyalty would benefit his career, but the consequences were far worse. On hearing about the affair, Francesco related the information to Pietro who, in his fury, apparently strangled the poor young lady with a dog leash (!) in July 1576, and had her lover imprisoned and eventually strangled as well. This was given the a-okay from Francesco. Eleonora’s young son, Cosimino, died a few weeks later, allegedly of dysentery, but it’s entirely possible that Pietro suspected that the boy was not his and committed another horrible crime.

  Francesco attempted to cover the whole thing up by putting out an official story that Eleonora had died in a terrible accident, but few believed it. And these dreadful events came about simply because Caccini saw a way for potential personal advancement.

  William Lawes (1602–1645)

  A shot in the dark

  After the Elizabethan and Jacobean (that’s a fancy word for “during the time of King James”) eras of music and literature, there was a marked dropping off in the amount of great music produced in England. This was due in part to the political turmoil that ravaged the country in the mid-seventeenth century. The English Civil War and the Commonwealth period that followed saw the rise of Puritanism and its dislike of certain music—and theater, and booze, and most celebrations. When said sticks-in-the-mud finally attained power after the war and executed James’s son, King Charles I, fun was officially outlawed. Well, not really, but it must have seemed like it. However, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan who assumed the status of “Lord Protector” of England (some would argue that he was a “king” in all but name), was known to be very fond of dancing and tobacco. Nevertheless, the theaters were closed and music certainly suffered; Cromwell obviously favored some sins over others.

  William Lawes stands out as a shining musical example in those chaotic times. Charles was a talented musician himself, and he and Lawes may have played music together from the 1620s, when Lawes’s teacher directed a group of musicians in the employ of then-prince Charles. In 1635, now-king Charles appointed Lawes to the somewhat snooty-sounding position of “musician in ordinary for lutes and voices,” a fancy title for one of the king’s personal musicians. Composing both religious and secular music for the king, Lawes became highly regarded in London and beyond. He also wrote a significant amount of music for the stage.

  Lawes was an ardent royalist, and when Charles came into conflict with Parliament and the civil war began, Lawes enlisted in the army to fight for his king. Charles firmly believed that he ruled by the will of God and was answerable to no one: not Parliament, not the people, and certainly not the no-fun Puritans. This pig-headed position was known as divine right (i.e., that the monarch is appointed by God to rule and can do so unquestioned). It rubbed more than a few people the wrong way, especially in England, where the concept of the monarch ruling by consent of the governed had existed in some form since the days of the Magna Carta in 1215.

  For his loyalty, Lawes was given a position in the King’s Life Guards, which, by the way, was not set up to protect the king while he went swimming. Maybe there’s a television show concept in this: featuring well-toned royal guards running in slow motion across a beach in southern England wearing full seventeenth-century finery, while viol consort music plays—maybe not.

  This was supposed to be an honorary position to keep Lawes out of danger. However, in spite of this precaution, a Parliamentarian soldier “casually shot” and killed Lawes, probably during the defeat and rout of Royalist forces at the Battle of Rowton Heath (near the city of Chester) on September 24, 1645. The conflict was chaotic; Lawes was likely killed by incidental crossfire and never saw it coming. Charles was deeply saddened at the loss; as a later writer noted:

  Hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, he had a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick.

  Because the English could never resist a good pun, the royalist Thomas Jordan wrote in an epitaph, “Will. Lawes was slain by such whose wills were laws.”

  Alessandro Poglietti (early seventeenth century–1683)

  A blast from the past

  Poglietti was a composer and organist important for his keyboard works. Though he was Italian, he moved to Vienna by 1661 and from then until his death held the position of court organist to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, who honored him with titles and wealth. He inherited estates, and the pope also bestowed a papal knighthood on him; he must have impressed the higher-ups.

  His keyboard pieces were frequently early examples of program music—that is, they represented other things in sound. This was a practice that would not become truly popular until the nineteenth century; it consists of a musical work that has a separate narrative, conveyed by the music over the course of one or more pieces. Poglietti’s works invite the listener to envision other things: nightingales, hens, roosters, and even a Hungarian Protestant rebellion from 1671.

  Alessandro’s inclusion here is due to his dramatic death in July 1683, in Vienna. The Ottoman Turks launched a siege against the city, having long viewed it as the key to controlling the region. It was to be one of the last major assaults that the Ottomans would make on Western Europe, though they didn’t know that at the time, of course. Their army consisted of an astonishing 150,000 men, and things looked bleak for Vienna, which had only about 16,000 men capable of fighting. Without going into a long-winded history lesson, we can say that Vienna held out, and the subsequent battle (with reinforcements) routed the Turks in what was surely a humiliating defeat. But for a few months before that, the Ottomans methodically pounded the city, trying to wear down its thick walls with their three hundred cannons. Their initial preferred strategy was to dig tunnels underneath the city walls and blow them up, weakening the foundations.

  Poor Poglietti was a victim of one of these methods, either obliterated by cannon fire or in the wrong vicinity when an underground explosion hit. He didn’t live to see the triumph of the city he’d called home for more than twenty years.

  Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687)

  Going out with a bang

  Lully was noted for his considerable amount of excellent instrumental and ballet music in the service to the rather decadent French “Sun King,” Louis XIV. He became very wealthy in the king’s service and apparently liked to lord it over his rivals. He did everything he could to hinder them, which led to resentment, even hatred. He had quite a temper, and it was said that he broke violins on the backs of players if he didn’t like their playing. Nevertheless, his music was very popular, and he collaborated with the great playwright Molière, with whom he produced several comédies-ballets—hybrid works combining music and theater—though the two had a falling out in 1671.

  In January 1687, he was conducting a religious piece written to celebrate Louis XIV’s recent recovery from an illness. He was using a long staff to hit the floor and keep time, a method common in the days before conductors used batons. He accidentally struck and injured his toe, ultimately causing an abscess. Without the benefit of modern disinfectants and the like, the wound turned gangrenous. Lully refused to have the toe amputated, possibly because he wanted to continue to dance, and the gangrene spread. By March, he was dying.

  We do not know how he reacted to the idea of accidentally killing himself, but one story relates that on his deathbed he showed his usual defiance for the opinions of others, especially the Church. As a priest visited him, pressing him to renounce his sinful ways, Lully obliged and tossed the score for his final opera on the fire as a show of penitence for a life of un-Christian behavior. Satisfied, the priest granted him absolution and departed. A friend, horrified by what he had just witnessed, asked Lully why he had destroyed this last work. Lully smiled and explained that he had another copy.
<
br />   Alessandro Stradella (1639–1682)

  A narrow escape, more than once

  A noted Italian composer, Stradella is famous for inventing the concerto grosso form (no, that doesn’t mean the “gross concerto,” but rather the “large” one) as well as composing a sizable quantity of vocal and sacred music.

  But it’s the juicy bits we’re interested in here, and Al’s life had plenty of them. As a young man in Rome in the late 1660s, he attempted to embezzle money from the Church, but he was discovered and had to flee the city for a while. More infamously, he was also an inveterate womanizer who left a trail of angry husbands, outraged family members, deflowered virgins, and shocked clergymen.

  A popular story tells that Venetian nobleman Alvise Contarini once hired him to teach singing to his young mistress, Agnese Van Uffele; you can already guess where this is going. Unable to keep it in his pants, Stradella seduced her and fled with her to Turin. The furious noble sent two assassins after him. When they arrived, the hired killers discovered that Stradella had just finished composing a new oratorio and would be present at the performance the next day at St. Giovanni in Laterano. Seeing this as a stroke of luck, they plotted to kill him at the performance. However, after hearing the beauty of his music, they could not bring themselves to commit the act, and so instead confessed their plot to him, warning him that he needed to leave immediately. Hired assassins with hearts, who knew?

  Stradella married Agnese in 1677 in an attempt to bring legitimacy to their relationship. Sources say that agents of Contarini attacked him in Turin and left him for dead, but he did not die and recovered from his wounds. Stradella moved to Genoa in 1678, but there is no further mention of Agnese, so their happiness must have been short-lived. He still had many enemies; in February 1682 a hired killer stabbed and murdered him, probably at the request of one Giovanni Battista Lomellino, who was envious of his popularity and perhaps his ways with the ladies.

  John Abell (1653–after 1716/24)

  An un-bear-able choice

  Abell was a Scottish composer, singer, and lutenist. He found favor with the Catholic King James II of England, being listed as a member of the King’s Private Musick—a kind of personal orchestra that played for private royal functions—and earning a considerable amount of money. His fortune was due to change, however, when James was made to abdicate due to his religious outlook and his belief in the divine right of kings. As we saw, this was one of the main reasons that Cromwell and his buddies chopped off the head of James’s father, Charles I. Abell, a Catholic himself, was forced to flee England in 1688 with his monarch and take up residence with him in France, as part of a court-in-exile. James never did regain his throne and died in 1701.

  While there, Abell was permitted to travel about the continent, and word of his skilled singing spread. When he reached the Polish court, however, he was in for a rather unpleasant surprise. Sir John Hawkins, in his General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776), records the incident vividly:

  Upon his arrival at Warsaw, the king having notice of it, sent for him to his court. Abell made some slight excuse to evade going, but upon being told that he had everything to fear from the king’s resentment, he made an apology, and received a command to attend the king next day. Upon his arrival at the palace, he was seated in a chair in the middle of a spacious hall, and immediately drawn up to a great height; presently the king with his attendants appeared in a gallery opposite to him, and at the same instant a number of wild bears were turned in; the king bade him then choose whether he would sing or be let down among the bears: Abell chose the former, and declared afterwards that he never sang so well in his life.

  Now that’s a monarch who knew what he wanted! In any case, Abell survived the ordeal, left Poland (probably quite happily), and eventually sought permission to return to England, which was granted in 1699. He lived in England for a good number of years more, presumably having no further run-ins with hungry members of the Ursidae family.

  Marin Marais (1656–1728)

  A stone’s throw

  Marais is known to modern audiences from the popular French film Tous le matins du monde, a fictional biography that describes his troubled relationship with the reclusive and enigmatic composer Sainte-Colombe. He was portrayed by both Gérard Depardieu (as the older man) and his son, Guillaume Depardieu (as the younger one). Marais was a master of the bass viola de gamba and the principal composer of music for it in the early eighteenth century. Though surprisingly little is known of his life, he did father nineteen children, a feat that puts him in the same prolific hall of fame as his younger contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach, who sired twenty children by two wives. Marais’s wife, Catherine d’Amicourt, bore all nineteen of them, the poor dear. This was a remarkable achievement, given the dangers of childbirth in those days.

  Speaking of medical risks, Marais was known for writing some unusual program music. Late in his life, he produced an amusing, if probably excruciating, example based on an actual experience he had endured. Found in his fifth book of Pièces de Viole (he wrote five such books, containing nearly six hundred pieces), it is called Tableau de l’Opération de la Taille, “Description of the Operation of the Stone,” a musical depiction of the surgical removal of a bladder stone. Yes, a description of an eighteenth-century surgery, in musical form.

  The work is annotated with a number of phrases as it progresses, to aid the performer in expressively interpreting each piece of music. These include such helpful comments as:

  • “The appearance of the operating table”

  • “Trembling at its sight”

  • “Serious thoughts”

  • “Knotting the silk restrains for arms and legs”

  • “Here the incision is made”

  • “The stone is drawn”

  • “Blood flows”

  Well, it’s certainly a switch from adagio, allegro, and andante. One wonders if the musicians were supposed to make appropriate facial expressions at each step of the operation.

  This was not the only time Marais ventured into the world of medical thematic programming. In his fourth book of viol pieces he wrote the colorful Allemande L’Asthmatique, which sought to simulate in music the wheezing and breathiness of an asthmatic episode. Marais was either something of a musical joker, or was maybe giving the world just a bit too much information about his private life.

  Henry Purcell (1659–1695)

  You’ll catch your death out there

  Purcell is rightly regarded as one of the greatest composers the green and pleasant land of England has ever produced, certainly the greatest since the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. He wrote a large amount of music in his short life and showed promise to become even greater. Only thirty-five at the time of his death, he was at the height of his career. Had he lived, he might have even eclipsed that great German composer and naturalized English citizen Handel.

  It is ironic that the popular story of his death, if true, is one of the silliest and most wasteful of tragic accidents that need not have happened at all. Like many a good Englishman throughout time, Henry was said to be rather fond of his drink and of socializing with his friends at the taverns and theaters. These boys’ nights out apparently increasingly irritated his wife, but despite her attempts to curtail them, they continued.

  Returning late from the theater one night, Henry arrived home to discover that he was locked out. His wife had given instructions to the servants not to let him in, no matter how he protested. She figured this would be a good lesson and would limit his future outings. Unfortunately, she was right. For whatever reason, Henry stayed out too long, and in the cold, damp weather that England is so well known for, he caught a chill that became a fever and worsened. He died on November 21, 1695. The remorse his wife must have felt is beyond comprehension.

  Another less fanciful theory is that he died of tuberculosis unrelated to his socializing, an all-too-common killer in those times. Still another story circu
lated that he died of, or maybe was even murdered by, tainted chocolate; perhaps “Death by Chocolate” is not just a modern dessert phenomenon. Whatever the truth, he made and signed a will leaving everything to his wife (he apparently had forgiven her) on the very day he died, so he must have known that the end was coming soon.

  However it happened, classical music was robbed of a singular genius who deserved more time in this world, not unlike Mozart nearly a century later. We can only wonder what both of them would have accomplished had they lived another thirty or forty years!

  Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)

  The Red Priest with a wandering eye

  Dear old Tony, most famous for The Four Seasons, which incidentally are not salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, but rather four concertos in a larger collection of twelve. Known for writing at least one concerto for nearly every instrument known to humanity except the nose flute (and who knows, one may turn up someday), he has also been unfairly disparaged for a lack of originality. Stravinsky quipped that he is “greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”

  Called the “Red Priest of Venice” because of his hair color, he wasn’t exactly the model priest the Church was looking for. He was said to be perfectly willing to set aside priestly duties if a musical idea came to mind, even in mid-service! There are also reports that he may have suffered from asthma (now in doubt), and that he could thus be excused from having to celebrate mass because he simply didn’t have the breath to intone all the chants and texts. Or it might just have been a good excuse for getting out of doing it.