Today I was teaching my 19th-century harmony course, starting with John Field’s Nocturnes, and as I was placing my Schirmer edition on the piano, it fell open to the little capsule biography of the composer. By chance my eye lit on the following words:
…He died in Moscow January 11, 1837.
Field’s execution was distinguished for taste and extreme delicacy, and characterized by an extreme ease and placidity of manner which sometimes amounted to a morbid languor and indifference.
For the next couple of minutes I was unable to continue teaching. I had always rather assumed that Field died a natural death, but the shock was somewhat ameliorated by the assurance that, thank goodness, at least his execution had been extremely delicate. Those Russians really know how to kill a man.