Margaret Mikulska wrote:

>Not a long time ago - a couple of seasons - at the Met, a singer in
>Janacek's The Makropoulos case had a fatal heart attack while singing
>something about life being short ...

My wife and I were in New York on our honeymoon when the above incidents
occurred.  A former student of mine was covering a role in the opera, and
she invited us to a piano dress rehearsal of the soon-to-be-fatal scene.
This tenor (whose name I cannot recall) was on a ladder retrieving files
from a file cabinet which extended into the fly space.  He was, I believe,
searching for a death certificate, singing about how everyone has to die
sometime.  Since my wife and I suffer from mild acrophobia, we commented to
one another about how impossible it would be for either of us to perform
this role as staged.

After this tenor's death and subsequent fall stopped that performance, I
heard that Jessye Norman (for whom the production had been mounted) was
reticent to perform the work, feeling that the production might be cursed.
She did, however, eventually return to the show.  And it was in December
of 1995, during a series of horrible blizzards, when all this took place.

Jan McDaniel <[log in to unmask]>