Giuseppe Sinopoli; Conductor Stricken During Performance

Giuseppe Sinopoli, an Italian conductor best known for daring interpretations of Verdi and Puccini, died after suffering a heart attack while conducting at a Berlin opera house. He was 54.

Sinopoli collapsed Friday night during the third act of Verdi’s four-act “Aida.” Doctors at the Deutsche Oper hall tried to revive him and then rushed him to the city’s German Heart Center clinic, where he died.

The evening performance, Sinopoli’s first with the Deutsche Oper since 1990, was stopped.

A man of eclectic tastes, Sinopoli studied medicine as well as music, graduating from medical school with a degree in Freudian psychoanalysis. In musical writings, he expounded on the idea that great music is the product of neurosis, and that that should determine how it is conducted.

Recently, he and his wife, Silvia, were pursuing doctorates in archeology, and were participants in an ongoing dig in Syria.

Born Nov. 2, 1946, in Venice, Sinopoli studied music during the late 1960s and early 1970s in his home city as well as in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Italy.

He founded the Bruno Maderna Ensemble in 1975, named after a fellow Venetian conductor with whom he studied in Darmstadt, Germany. He then began his career in earnest as an avant-garde composer before turning more to conducting.

His most well-known composition, the opera “Lou Salome,” based on the life of a sexually obsessed patient of Freud, was first performed in 1981 in Munich.

International acclaim as a conductor grew after his interpretation of Verdi’s “Macbeth” with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin in 1980, leading to invitations to conduct in New York, London, Vienna and other cities.

Sinopoli was appointed chief conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Rome’s St. Cecilia National Academy in 1983, and a year later he took up the same post with Rome’s Philharmonic Orchestra.

He debuted at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1985 with Puccini’s “Tosca” and at Germany’s Wagner festival in Bayreuth with “Tannhauser.” He was scheduled to conduct Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth this summer.

Italian Culture Minister Giovanna Melandri said Sinopoli’s death “deprives the world of the music of one of the most mature, intense, complete and characteristic directors.”

In addition to his wife, Sinopoli is survived by two sons.