u/orangecatnosefreckle

Found another nugget while researching. This one is from Music Mirrors of the Second Empire, by Frederick H. Martens. The Musical Quarterly (1930) referencing the 1854 Paris Opera season:

A performance of Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots" that season, incidentally, was marked by a curious tragedy. Captain Krume, a Prussian army officer living in Paris, found to his despair that he was growing deaf. When convinced he could no longer hear either the trumpets in the cavalry barracks of the Champ de Mars, or the drums of the infantry barracks at the Place Vendome, he purchased a box seat at the Opera. There, when the famous chorus "Piff, paff!" failed to register on his ear, he drew a pistol and shot himself so awkwardly that the dresses of the ladies in the box were spattered with his blood, and a bit of the unfortunate suicide's jaw-bone was afterwards found hanging from a limb of the great glass chandelier.

To offset tragedy, however, there was a farce. A Count Thaddeus de Tysakiewics, editor of a Leipsic musical journal, claiming blood relationship with the erstwhile Grand-Dukes of Lithuania, sued the director of the Paris Opera because of the "mental and musical anguish" a scandalously mutilated performance of Weber's "Freischtitz" had caused him. Instead of collecting damages he made himself a figure of fun, and had to pay the costs of court.

Full text on JSTOR

I LOVED Medici TV but there doesn't seem to be anything comparable on any of my libraries' digital services. There has to be a better option than going to a branch and digging through physical media. Subscription services are simply not in my budget but I'd happily get a non-resident card or petition my local library for whatever service you can recommend. TIA!