Mental: Genius in Anguish

Reading biographies of great artists or watching films about their lives, one would have to think that suffering is essential for art and that all great artists have to be a little mad! The truth is of course, far more mundane, genius is after all 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, so to produce great art means that the creative spirit also has to train itself, work to order and have sound business sense!

But in all honesty, mental illness and neurological disease have played no small part in the production of great art and music is no different. The Romantics may have played up their wild side: all long hair, laudanum addiction and umpteen mistresses, but one of the foremost Romantics, Schumann had to cope lifelong with genuine mental illness.

He was plagued by bouts of feeling low and miserable, culminating in his attempt to drown himself in the Rhine, following which he spent his last 5 years locked away in an asylum, not allowed to see his wife and family, with only his devotee Brahms for support. The mental illness has been sometimes diagnosed as a bipolar disorder and as neurosyphilis: the stigma of the latter has evoked strong objections from Victorian critics, but today in 2011, we know that no illness is a punishment, all are unfortunate accidents of life. As we battle cancer and AIDS, we can understand and sympathize with an era where syphilis was an incurable disease, a silent killer which would flare up and destroy lives. Either way, Schumann’s  achievements in music are remarkable inspite of, or even because of his illness. His mercurial musical personality has often been interpreted as bipolar, hence the music he wrote was affected in no small way by his condition. His productivity itself would come in spurts, mirroring the manic phase of his illness, while later in life, he was plagued by musical hallucinations, mistaking his own works as having been sent to him in a dream by his beloved Schubert. His Violin Concerto is almost too painful to hear, trying to preserve his artistry and his love by way of a repetitive stating of tunes : neurologists and laymen alike hear his demons taking over in this work and it was suppressed for almost 100 years by his family and friends: for me, it is the most heroic, awe-inspiring work I know, a fight for life in minims and crotchets.

Hugo Wolf was another Late Romantic composer of vastly influential songs who spent much of his short life locked away in an asylum, while Bedrich Smetana, the Czech nationalist, became deaf, blind and mad in late life as a consequence of neurosyphilis.

Maurice Ravel wrote some of the most colourful and voluptuous music of the 20^th century but in person he was a curiously elfine asexual figure: the later part of his life saw him completely debilitated by a neurodegenerative condition (possibly Pick’s disease) and he was at the end, unable to compose or even function, to name or recognise everyday objects. Yet his immortal “Bolero” with its hypnotically repeated theme, is borne out of the disease, its repetitiveness being cited by neurologists as the yearning for stability in the fractured consciousness and inability to concentrate typical among Pick’s disease sufferers.

All these great composers had to transcend their illness to create great art, sometimes the illness even contributed to the pattern of their art, and even though their illness won at the end, it was their triumph that their heroic struggles will never be forgotten.