Falling Off a Clef

Everyone dies. But some people die in bizarre ways. And for some reason, composers seem to be especially prone to such deaths. Taking his cue from the classic Great Operatic Disasters and Lives of the Great Composers, Stephen Pollard's Falling Off A Clef describes some of those deaths, and the lives which the composers led. There's Alban Berg, who died from complications from an insect bite. There's Jean-Baptiste Lully, who died of an infection after stabbing his foot with a conducting stick. Or Henry Purcell, whose wife had grown so tired of him staying out late at night that, one evening, she instructed their servant to lock him out. He caught a cold and died from it. And poor Anton Webern who, popping outside for a post-dinner cigar after curfew in Berlin in 1945, was shot by an over-zealous drunk American GI. Falling Off A Clef uses the unusual deaths of many classical composers as an introduction to their life and work - an amusingly written but informative guide to many of the greatest names in music, and some of the more obscure but fascinating composers.