In January 1687, the most powerful composer in Europe stabbed himself in the foot with his own conducting staff while performing a Te Deum to celebrate the King of France's recovery from surgery. The wound became infected. His doctor begged him to amputate the foot. He refused. The gangrene spread. He died two months later. The piece he had been conducting was a celebration of the king's recovery.

His name was Jean-Baptiste Lully. Born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence in 1632. He had moved to Paris as a teenager and risen by sheer political talent through the dancing schools and orchestras of Louis XIV's court until he was the most powerful musician in Europe. He had invented French opera. He had bought a royal monopoly on staging it. He owned the Académie Royale de Musique. He conducted with a tall heavy pointed wooden staff that he struck against the floor to keep time.

On the eighth of January, 1687, Lully was conducting his own Te Deum at the church of the Feuillants on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from anal fistula surgery. In the climactic passage he brought the staff down hard. He missed the floor. The pointed iron tip of the staff drove through his shoe and into his right big toe. The court doctors recommended amputating the toe. Lully refused. He was vain. He was a dancer. He could not lose a toe. The infection spread to his foot. The doctors recommended amputating the foot. He refused again. The gangrene reached his leg. He spent the next ten weeks in agony, working on a final opera he never completed. He died at his Paris mansion on the twenty-second of March.

He was fifty-four years old. The Te Deum he had been conducting when he stabbed himself was a celebration of Louis XIV's survival of surgery. The king lived another twenty-eight years. The composer died refusing to remove a foot. Within a generation, conductors had abandoned the long pointed conducting staff. They replaced it with a slim wooden baton too light to wound. Every classical orchestra in the world today is conducted with a stick the size of a chopstick because in 1687, the most powerful composer in Europe was too proud of his feet to be amputated.

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