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An unsolved backstabbing
In the early hours of October 23, 1764, the violinist and composer Jean-Marie Leclair was found in his home in the La Marais neighborhood of Paris by his gardener and neighbors with three stab wounds in his back. The murder came as a shock to the public, but those close to him were not as surprised as they might have been by Leclair’s untimely demise. Pompous, conceited, and selfish, the violinist virtuoso was not afraid to make enemies.
The first suspect in the murder was the gardener, Jacques Paysant, who not only found the dead composer, but also had a criminal record and misreported the time that he had found his dead employer. The dishonesty was ruled to be irrelevant to the homicide, however, and Paysant was presumed to have lied out of fear of suspicion for those previous crimes. As such, the gardener was not prosecuted.
Louis Quenet, Leclair’s son-in-law, was the second suspect. A fellow musician, Quenet harbored resentment toward his father-in-law from his many refusals to allow Quenet a place in the court of the Duke of Gramont, Leclair’s patron. When questioned by authorities about the murder, Quenet gave a false alibi and even remarked to the surgeon who performed Leclair’s autopsy that he “only received what he deserved.” Additionally, he was later discovered to have altered witness testimony. Like Paysant, Quenet never faced prosecution.
The third and final suspect was Leclair’s ex-wife, Louise Roussel. Roussel was close with Quenet and perhaps shared his resentment at not being allowed into the patronage of the Duke of Gramont. She also faced financial difficulty after divorcing the composer, so the payout she got upon his death and after posthumously publishing some of his works, may have been a motive. Roussel, too, was never prosecuted for the murder.
Ultimately, the case went cold, and the culprit was never caught, but historians continue to speculate and search for new evidence in hopes of solving the murder.
A sinister psyche
Carlo Gesualdo was an Italian Renaissance composer (1566-1613) whose music was often perceived as disquieting, creepy, even disturbing due to its eclectic use of jarring harmonies and chromaticism. Some argue, however, that the disturbing nature of Gesualdo’s music comes from something else entirely: the composer’s own sinister psyche.
Gesualdo was known for his volatile temperament, being quick to anger. When he learned of his wife’s affair with the Duke of Andria, he devised a plot to catch them in bed together and murder them on the spot. Gesualdo went through with this grisly plan in October of 1590 in Naples, but he didn’t stop there. To further expose his wife’s infidelity, he displayed the bloodied bodies of his victims in the street for onlookers to see.
Shockingly, Gesualdo was never charged with the murders, as the heinous act was committed within the aristocratic codes of revenge practiced in Naples at the time. His punishment came in due time, however, as the lurid details of the murder caused outrage, and he fled to his castle to escape the press and an enraged public.
Headless Haydn
When the Esterházy family came to claim the remains of the composer to whom they had been patrons throughout his career, Franz Joseph Haydn, they made a shocking discovery on opening his casket: the composer was missing his head! Well, he was missing his skull, to be exact, as he had been buried eleven years earlier, and his body had already decomposed, leaving only his skeleton.
Haydn had a friend named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum who studied phrenology, the pseudo-science that linked characteristics of the skull with intellect and personality, and Rosenbaum was eager to ascertain the source of Haydn’s genius. He bribed the cemetery groundskeeper and enlisted the help of a doctor friend, Johann Nepomuk Peter, to help with the nasty business of stripping the skull of its flesh (there is a grisly record that describes how the stench of the newly-stolen head made Dr. Peter pass out), and he began his study of the skull. Rosenbaum never found much in his phrenological labors, but he decided to keep the skull.
Once discovered, it didn’t take the police long to identify Rosenbaum as a suspect once the skull had been declared missing, but the thief had been tipped off about the pursuit and managed to pass off an anonymous skull as Haydn’s. Before the remains, now capped with a skull, could be moved to the Esterházy Estate, one of the Esterházys realized that the skull was that of a much younger man, and it was decided that the composer would not go to his final resting place until his own skull was returned.
Rosenbaum managed to evade the police the remaining eleven years of his life, and after he died, he willed the skull to Dr. Peter, the very same Dr. Peter who had helped him steal it in the first place. The cranium passed hands several times, until it somehow ended up on the piano of the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna, where it remained an open secret for over half a century. Finally, in 1954, 140 years after the composer’s death, word got around to the Esterházy family about the skull on the Society’s piano, and it was reunited with the composer’s skeleton. All of Franz Joseph Haydn, plus the imposter skull, now reside at the Esterházy Estate in Eisenstadt, Austria.
Mythical Murder
A well known yet apocryphal story in classical music history is that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart being murdered by his contemporary, the composer, Antonio Salieri in 1791. The story goes that jealous and enraged at his rival’s success compared to his own dwindling stardom, Salieri quickened Mozart’s demise by poisoning him. Unfortunately for true crime enthusiasts, there is no evidence for this, but it doesn’t stop the legend from having its believers. This is mostly due to the dramatization in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (later turned into an Oscar-winning film), a work which puts Salieri center-stage and pits him against Mozart in scene after scene.
However, Shaffer was not the first to adapt the conspiracy theory. The story had been around for several decades after Mozart’s untimely death, and the Russian author, Alexander Pushkin, decided to expand the legend into one of four short plays in his “Little Tragedies” of 1830. To augment the tension, Pushkin fabricated scenes of artistic rivalry and competition that have no basis in fact.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov even tried his hand at interpreting the gruesome tale in an opera he composed in 1898 based on Pushkin’s play. Rimsky-Korsakov widens the gulf between the two composers by contrasting their voice types – bass for Salieri and tenor for Mozart – as well as their vocal styles, with Mozart’s lines being much more lyrical than Salieri’s declamatory phrases.
Do you have a favorite dark or mysterious story from classical music history? Share it with us! Email classical@classicalkc.org.
