Who would have guessed that David Carradine's sad end would lead me to Stanley Sadie's venerable New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians! Thanks to Christopher Beam's recent article in Slate, I now know that the first person to die from AEA, as those-in-the-know say, was none other than the Czech composer Frantisek Koczwara. Ronald R. Kidd's New Grove entry describes his death thus:
He was reputed to have had unusual vices, and was accidentally hanged while conducting an experiment in a house of ill repute. Susan Hill, his accomplice in the experiment, was tried for murder at the Old Bailey on 16 September 1791 and was acquitted.
That same year, a pamphlet detailing the act was circulated entitled "Modern Propensities; or, an essay on the art of strangling." Dude looks so happy to go that way. While it's always nice to see obscure eighteenth-century composers get mentioned in the popular press, I can't help but wonder if this should give us insight into the artistic temperment, or remind us of humanity's perverse fascination with the sexual habits of others?
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