A recent article in the Telegraph about genius and madness

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/7824943/You-dont-have-to-be-mad-to-be-a-composer.html

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It’s always been a mark of creative types that they’re somehow “not quite normal”. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,” said Dryden and it’s notoriously true that even well-balanced geniuses have trouble distinguishing between the real world and the teeming visions of their own brains. “That’s all very well,” said Balzac in response to a friend’s story about his sister’s illness, “but who am I going to marry Eugénie Grandet to?”

Genius is often moody and obsessive to a degree that baffles outsiders who can’t see why a tiny red mark on a canvas or a choice of adjective should matter so much.

Composers have an extra sign of madness. They hear sounds in their head, which is surely not so different from the “voices” saints and madmen hear. You could say being slightly unhinged just goes with the territory. But some creative artists actually go over the edge and become what we might call clinically insane. Among them are three composers who this year have significant anniversaries.

One of them, the late Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo (born around 450 years ago) was a man for whom self-torment and melancholia were meat and drink. He discovered his wife in flagrante and murdered both her and her lover on the spot. He spent the rest of his life in extravagant self-mortification, mixing prayer and self-flagellation (though this didn’t stop him enjoying some gruesome black magic with mistresses involving the drinking of menstrual blood). Mind you, quite a few Italian Renaissance noblemen enjoyed a spot of sadomasochistic sex mixed with pagan rituals, so what seems mad to us may have been as everyday to them as a trip to Ikea. This is the danger with ascribing madness to people from a remote historical era.

Robert Schumann lived much closer to our own (he was born 200 years ago) but even with him caution is needed. Read old biographies of Schumann and they tell you that before he went mad he suffered from “nervous breakdowns”. But psychologists tell us that the term nervous breakdown doesn’t actually mean anything. In any case, 19th-century men seemed to have fits of the vapours and neuralgia almost as often as women, so perhaps Schumann was just typical of his time.

Then there’s the great songwriter Hugo Wolf, born 150 years ago, who suffered delusions of grandeur and died in an asylum of “general paralysis of the insane”.

The coincidence of three mentally unhinged composers sharing an anniversary year has been seized on by the Cheltenham Music Festival. It’s featuring music by all three composers, and there’s also a series of lectures and conversations entitled Sound Mind which examines the complicated links between musicality, creativity, emotions and mental health.

One of the contributors is Dr Ray Tallis, one-time professor of geriatric medicine and a leading thinker on the mystery of human consciousness. He takes a robust view of Schumann’s condition.

“The striking thing about Schumann,” he says, “is how normal he was. Of course, he had to face the hostility of his future father-in-law, who did everything he could to keep Schumann and his daughter apart. It was only in the 1850s that things started to go wrong, when he heard voices in his head.”

This, Tallis says, was nothing to do with Schumann’s genius, it was just the onset of tertiary syphilis. “In the 19th century around a third of all patients in mental asylums suffered from tertiary syphilis, which has a variety of symptoms. Patients might have feelings of persecution, episodes of manic energy, or hear voices, and Schumann experienced all of these.”

So is it just romantic mythology to see these composers’ creativity as necessarily bound up with madness? “There is the idea,” Tallis says, “that creativity is a kind of Faustian pact – you burn brightly and live more intensely, but the price you pay is that you burn out quickly. Or that geniuses are like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and was punished for it. But there isn’t any evidence that creative people are more susceptible to mental illness than the rest of the population.”

For Tallis, creativity becomes meaningful when it rises above pathology. “There’s a theory put forward by American literary critic Edmund Wilson that creative artists are trying to heal a childhood wound. That’s plausible when you think of someone like Mahler, who’s another 'anniversary’ composer this year. He told Freud that the banal moments in his music came from a traumatic moment in his childhood when he saw his parents quarrelling violently. He rushed into the street, where a hurdy-gurdy was playing a banal tune. That’s why you get profound moments next to shrill, banal ones in his symphonies.”

Tallis is impatient with this kind of reductionism. “We all have wounds, whereas only some of us become a creator like Mahler. Art only becomes significant when it gets to grips with the wound of being human – that is, that we’re born, we live contingent lives full of tragedy, and then die.”

All this seems wise and to the point. But I wonder whether it’s the whole story. For me there’s an extra poignancy in the music of these composers, which I think comes from the fact that – to borrow Van Gogh’s phrase – they “feel the wing of madness passing over them”.

Gesualdo’s madrigals are so tormented in their chromaticism that often they lean towards paroxysm, and Wolf’s songs such as Kennst du das Land do something similarly extreme in romantic post-Wagnerian terms. As for Schumann, there are moments in his early piano music that almost seem like portrayals of unhinged mental states. In Carnaval a fast and furious movement is suddenly pushed aside by a charming waltz that comes from nowhere, lasts for a few seconds and then vanishes. It’s like “hearing voices” but with the beautiful lucidity of art.

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