A dangerous bike

and a
late blooming
composer

Ernest Chausson
20 January 1855 - 10 June 1899

109 years ago today, Chausson died in Limary, Seine-et-Oise, as a result of a bike accident. He was 44. He lost control of the bike he was riding on a steep downhill slope. He rolled straight into the brick wall of his estate and died instantly. He was buried in Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris.

A late-blooming French romantic composer Chausson died just as his career was beginning to flourish. From 1886 until his death, he was secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique. He received many of the Paris artistic elite in his salon, including the composers Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Isaac Albéniz, the poet Mallarmé, the Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev, and the impressionist painter Claude Monet. Chausson also assembled an important collection of impressionist art.