When searching for someone to compose a pianoforte arrangement of their immensely popular comic opera The Mikado, the theatrical duo plucked a young former shoemaker from Lynn, Massachusetts.
The concluding part of this two-part survey of music and disease looks at examples that arose from pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including: works by Stephen Foster and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel written in the wake of a series of cholera outbreaks, and the sometimes curiously lighthearted musical response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.