Read on to discover how a pianist tragically collapsed and died at the keyboard during a fatal performance...
A final Grieg performance...
On the evening of 2 April 1951, the 54-year-old Simon Barere stepped on stage at Carnegie Hall, New York, to play Grieg’s perennially popular Piano Concerto. It was, remarkably, the first time Barere had ever performed the piece in public, despite his reputation as a scintillating virtuoso of strong poetic instincts.
At first all seemed well, as conductor Eugene Ormandy cued the Philadelphia Orchestra for the timpani roll and crashing chord which open the Grieg concerto. ‘Mr Barere appeared to be in top form,’ the New York Times reviewer Olin Downes wrote. ‘His entrance solo was brilliantly delivered.’ Soon, though, Downes became ‘puzzled’ by irregularities in Barere’s performance, whose pace seemed ‘excessively fast’.
A fatal performance... disaster strikes
Then, just after the cellos had announced the movement’s second theme, came disaster. Downes initially thought Barere had bent sideways to listen ‘with especial attention to the instruments as he matched his tone with theirs’. But then the pianist’s left hand slipped from the keyboard, and he instantly ‘fell senseless from the stool to the floor’.
The orchestra stopped playing ‘in consternation’, and shouts went up for a doctor. Barere was carried from the stage ‘with some difficulty’ and taken to a dressing room. Police and an ambulance were summoned, and for half an hour attempts were made to revive the stricken pianist. They were in vain: Barere never regained consciousness and was subsequently pronounced by the medical examiner to have died of a ‘spontaneous cerebral haemorrhage’.
Death at the keys... a fatal performance but the concert continued
The concert in the hall had meanwhile continued, on the assumption that Barere had suffered a fainting fit or some other non-life-threatening incident. The Swedish tenor Set Svanholm performed a song cycle by Ture Rangström – ‘with the most admirable expressiveness and control’, wrote Downes – and a planned interval followed, but the rest of the programme was never completed.
When the orchestra reassembled to play Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, a shocked audience was told Barere had died, ‘and it was the feeling of all the musicians taking part in the concert that it should be abandoned’. Barere’s wife Helen and son Boris were in Carnegie Hall that evening: the sheer awfulness of what they saw and experienced can only be imagined.
Who was Simon Barere? A fine pianist who overcame great hardship
In such a horrifying way was Barere’s life cut short – the end of a career path that itself had been anything but smooth. Born in Odessa in 1896, Barere was the eleventh of 13 children in an impoverished Jewish family. When his father died unexpectedly, the youthful Barere earned money for the family by playing in silent movie cinemas and restaurants. The death of his mother when he was 16 was another serious setback. But Barere ploughed on.
A scintillating audition gained him admission to the St Petersburg Imperial Conservatory, and he spent seven years there honing his brilliant natural talent. The composer Glazunov, the conservatory’s director, bent the usual rules designed to keep Jews from attending and ensured Barere stayed long enough to avoid conscription for World War I military service. Barere finally graduated in 1919 with the Rubinstein Prize, the conservatory’s top award for pianists. A glittering future beckoned.
Simon Barere... the darling of New York
But instead, he had to battle constantly with adversity. At first confined to Russia, he eventually left for Latvia, where his wife and son joined him. In 1932, the family decamped to Berlin, just as National Socialism and anti-semitism were on the rise. For a period, Barere was reduced to playing in vaudeville shows anonymously for money. A shift to London followed, and the attention that his performances gleaned there brought an invitation first to the US, and then his Carnegie Hall debut in November 1936.
New York loved Barere, and what one critic called ‘his superb technique and his command of sensitively managed singing tone’. The years of wandering in Europe, with their stop-start impact on his career development, seemed finally to be over. The 1940s were good to Barere, and by the time he walked ‘briskly’ on to the Carnegie Hall platform on that fateful day in 1951, he had a global reputation as a viscerally exciting performer.
A tragic and fatal performance... but a lasting legacy
The following day, the pianist’s body was taken to lie in state at Riverside Memorial Chapel, a Jewish funeral home in Manhattan. ‘From 1pm to 10pm at least 500 persons had viewed Mr Barere’s body,’ the New York Times reported. Olin Downes had no doubt about the stature of the musician the classical community had lost. ‘There was no more modest, studious and sincere artist,’ he wrote admiringly. ‘He leaves not only a great but an enviable reputation behind him.’