Italian conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli, died last night after suffering a heart attack while conducting Berlin's Deutsche Oper in a performance of Verdi's Aida, the opera announced. Sinipoli was at his conductor's rostrum in the orchestra pit when he dropped his baton and fell to the floor during the third act. Members of the orchestra helped him into the wings where he died shortly afterwards of a massive heart attack, despite the attention of medics.
Sinopoli, chief conductor at Dresden's highly reputed Staatskapelle since 1992, was one of the most lauded conductors in the world as well as being a composer and medical doctor. He performed in all the great opera houses, including Milan's La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York as well as the Paris Opera and London's Covent Garden.
In recent years he was a regular at that shrine to Wagnerian music, the Bayreuth festival. Born in Venice on November 2, 1946, Sinopoli studied music at the Venice Conservatory and medicine at the University of Padua simultaneously. He graduated in 1972 with a doctoral dissertation on criminal anthropology.
