"In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s 'Aida'... part of the stage collapsed.... He was 'knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed...'"

"'I thought I was going to die,' a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.... Seven years earlier... Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in 'I Pagliacci' in Milwaukee in November 1998... when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian. The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife. 'I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,' Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. 'At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.' Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him. When the police arrived the director inadvertently gave them the plot of 'Pagliacci'; unfamiliar with the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo’s text, they believed Mr. Rendall had stabbed Mr. Julian in a fit of jealousy...."

From "David Rendall, Tenor Who Suffered Operatic Mishaps, Dies at 76/He appeared regularly at the Metropolitan Opera and sang in major European opera houses, but a stage accident in 2005 nearly ended his career" (NYT).