'Genius is close to madness’. The phrase is still widely repeated as though it were a self-evident truth. And when such luminaries as pop-phenomenon Lady Gaga inform us that she prays ‘for the gift of insanity’ – in order to make her like the ‘great creative people’ she admires – then it seems the idea is a long way from dying out.
But there are good reasons to have doubts. In its extreme forms, psychosis – that’s to say, any mental illness so severe that it renders the sufferer incapable of coping with everyday life – is more often creatively fatal than not. Even when it isn’t, as the eminent psychiatrist and amateur musician Anthony Storr pointed out, truly psychotic art is often very boring. When the rational conscious mind, the ‘ego’, loses control, its utterances tend to become repetitive, stilted, formulaic: full of the kind of dissociated imagery that makes sense to no one but the sufferer – and perhaps not even to him.
Could it be that, when not crippling, mental illness is creatively stimulating?
But like its physical counterparts, mental illness comes in a huge range of degrees. The mental health charity MIND estimates that one in four adults will suffer at least one episode of depression, yet for most of their lives most of these people will function perfectly normally. Could it be that, when not crippling, mental illness is creatively stimulating, even helping to produce great works of art?
The source of the ‘genius is close to madness’ statement appears to be a couplet in John Dryden’s poem Absolom and Achitophel of 1681: ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’
The artist to see into the unconscious, nocturnal regions of the mind... but is not overwhelmed by them
What is striking about Dryden’s thought is the suggestion that great creative intelligence is near to madness, not congruent with it: the two states are separated by ‘thin partitions’. The point is that the partitions are thin enough to allow the artist to see into the unconscious, nocturnal regions of the mind that emerge unmediated in psychosis, but that they still remain strong enough to prevent the artist from being overwhelmed by them.
Mental illness and classical composers
This may become a little clearer if we look at the works of four composers who appear to have suffered from some form of mental illness at some stage in their lives.
Case study 1: Robert Schumann
Let’s start with Robert Schumann (1810-56), who died insane, in an asylum, after having attempted to drown himself in the River Rhine.
What caused that final collapse is still a hot topic. Was it syphilis, which he possibly contracted in his early twenties? Or did the extremes of an equally well-attested bipolar disorder (what used to be called ‘manic depression’) finally become too much for him?
Whatever the cause of the final breakdown, as Kay Redfield Jamison points out in her classic study of bipolarity and creativity, Touched with Fire, Schumann’s creative pattern is typical of bipolar disorder: periods of intense, rapid creativity followed by episodes – coinciding with the onset of severe, at times suicidal depression – in which he was barely capable of writing a note (as in the winter of 1833-4 and, more devastatingly, 1844-5).
What is striking is how brilliantly the younger Schumann was able to express these alarming extremes in some of his finest works: in the piano cycles Kreisleriana and Davidsbündlertänze, in the song cycle Dichterliebe, and in the ingenious ‘bipolar’ tonal structure of the String Quartet Op. 41 No. 1. If Anthony Storr is right, then his ability to do so reflects a mind at least temporarily ‘in focus’.
Compare those masterpieces with some of Schumann’s later works. The revised version of the D minor Symphony (published in 1851 as ‘No. 4’) is in some ways an improvement on the first version, but it is also more formally conventional, less fluid and flexible than the original structure. Could this reflect a growing anxiety about the strength of those ‘thin partitions’ in Schumann’s own mind?
Does the Violin Concerto show a mind struggling to keep its sense of proportion?
Elsewhere, Schumann's last major work, the Violin Concerto (1853), is full of glorious music, but formally it is even more rigid than the revised Fourth Symphony. Is this perhaps evidence of a mind struggling to keep its sense of proportion? Despite its many beautiful ideas, the Violin Concerto still leaves some listeners feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
Case study 2: Anton Bruckner
Anton Bruckner (1824-96) experienced more than one terrible mental breakdown. Always prone to depression, he also suffered from what is now called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His famous ‘counting mania’ is well documented. It was devastating – at one point during his 1866-7 breakdown, Bruckner was found trying to count the leaves on a tree.
Visiting him in the sanatorium, his sister Rosalie soon realised her mistake in wearing a sequined dress – he had to be restrained from counting the sequins. The same obsessive tendencies can be found in his manuscripts: every bar is numbered, even in the nearly 750 bar-long finale of the Eighth Symphony.
But as Sigmund Freud liked to point out, obsession – when it isn’t actually pathological – can be a highly creative force. Bruckner’s numberings in his scores aren’t simply a symptom of ‘mania’. He doesn’t just count the bars from one to umpteen-hundred; he groups them in sequences of four, eight, ten, 12 and so on, in tandem with ‘figured’ analyses of the harmonies.
Bruckner’s symphonies are sometimes described as ‘cathedrals in sound’
Bruckner's own scores of two favourite works – Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica, and Mozart’s great Requiem – are meticulously analysed in the same way. Bruckner’s symphonies are sometimes described as ‘cathedrals in sound’. A devout Roman Catholic and outstanding organist, he knew and loved the cathedrals and chapels he worked in – most of all at the monastery of St Florian near Linz, where he found a spiritual home as a boy.
Perhaps his obsession with proportion in his own work reflects a desire to create similarly ‘safe’ structures for his wild, sometimes terrifying thoughts. Bruckner himself felt that by writing his Mass in F minor (begun towards the end of the 1866-7 crisis) he had been ‘delivered from the threat of madness’. For many listeners, that inner creative strength – what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the ‘will to health’ – can be felt in the music itself.
Case study 3: Tchaikovsky
Like Schumann, Tchaikovsky (1840-93) features prominently in lists of possible bipolar composers. Certainly he was subject to intense mood swings. When engaged on difficult work, Tchaikovsky was often exaggeratedly irritable, subject to chronic insomnia and plagued by bizarre phobias. It is said that when conducting he would sometimes hold his head for fear that it might fall off.
Tchaikovsky was subject to chronic insomnia and plagued by bizarre phobias
He was also prone to make sudden, inexplicable life-changing decisions. No one has explained adequately why, knowing his own homosexuality, Tchaikovsky made the disastrous attempt at marriage with one of his female students in 1877 – though the mental collapse that followed was predictable enough.
Tchaikovsky was also (and, according to Redfield Jamison, this is highly symptomatic of bipolar disorder) tormented by a powerful but irrational sense of guilt. This no doubt partly explains his fascination with Lord Byron’s hero Manfred, similarly tormented by a sense of having committed some unspeakable crime that he cannot remember.
Some of Tchaikovsky's most volatile works are among his very best
Yet when one looks at the works that are often held to be most representative of Tchaikovsky’s emotionally volatile nature – especially the Fourth and Sixth (Pathétique) Symphonies, one finds a structural integrity as impressive as the best of Bruckner. The first movement of the Fourth is one of the most tautly constructed, formally ingenious first movements in late 19th-century symphonic music. The finale embodies the idea of mood-swings in an argument of cogency.
‘People think great emotion means great music, but often the notes take fright and fly out of the window!’
Even the tragic finale of the Pathétique, so emotionally crushing after the elation of the preceding march, is beautifully laid-out, its climax deftly placed, its final ‘dying’ resolution not too long. To create structures like this, there has to be some degree of objectivity. ‘People think great emotion means great music,’ wrote Leoš Janáček, ‘but often the notes take fright and fly out of the window!’ The composer must also have the ability to stand back and calculate amid the white heat of inspiration.
Case study 4: Elgar
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was a composer who knew plenty about that creative ‘white heat’. Periods of exhilarated, rapid creation would be preceded by much longer stretches of anxious procrastination, and often followed by sudden, devastating reversals.
Elgar was always talking of making an end of himself
No sooner had he finished The Music Makers, one of his most revealingly personal works, than Elgar reported feeling ‘empty and cold – how I hated having written anything; so I wandered out again & shivered & longed to destroy the work of my hands – all wasted’.
The critic Ernest Newman remembered an occasion, while Elgar was at the height of his fame, when the composer’s wife, Alice, ‘tactfully steered the conversation away from the topic of suicide that had suddenly arisen; she whispered to me that Edward was always talking of making an end of himself.’
Alice Elgar seems to have functioned more as mother than as lover
Yet mention of Alice Elgar raises an intriguing issue. Alice was nearly ten years older than her husband, and in many ways she seems to have functioned more as mother than as lover to Elgar. At their house in Malvern, she turned his desk to the wall so he wouldn’t be distracted by the view. Often she would get up before him and rule bar lines onto the empty staves of his manuscript paper – a clear indication: ‘Now fill this in!’
After Alice died in 1920, Elgar wrote nothing of significance for over a decade, and showed signs of disillusion with what he’d achieved. But surely there was something healthy, something ‘sane’ in Elgar that made him choose Alice – an awareness that if he couldn’t find the stability he needed to create within himself, he still did know where to look for it.
So what is the link between mental illness and creativity? Can depression make for great music?
Obviously these issues are too complicated to be resolved in an article of this length, but at their heart lies a paradox worth considering here. Some form of, or tendency towards mental illness may be the fuel for many great creative endeavours; but in the expression of them, the giving of them artistic form and substance, we find something very different. Something, perhaps, best caught by Schumann’s contemporary, the poet Heinrich Heine:
‘Sickness is the only cause; Of the whole creative force; Creating I could heal my pain, Creating made me well again.’
It reminds me of a comment in the diaries of Sibelius from the years 1909-10. Following a throat tumour operation, the composer had been ordered to abstain from alcohol – to which he was addicted for most of his life. Sibelius cries out in pain: ‘How can I rid myself of these terrible shadows – or perhaps get them into some kind of new perspective?’
That his major work of that time, the Fourth Symphony, reflects some kind of agonising mental struggle, is clear to many listeners. Yet I have never found the work depressing; indeed when suffering from almost incapacitating clinical depression myself some years ago, I found it encouraging.
Composing the Fourth may have helped Sibelius; listening to it helped me. Hearing how a creative mind transformed frightening, potentially overwhelming feelings into something solid, strong, imaginatively brilliant and even beautiful was an affirmative experience.
Like Sibelius, I found a ‘new perspective’ emerging as I listened to it and thought about it. The roots of a great work of art may – and I stress may – be in mental torment, but the urge to give it form is one of the sanest impulses of which the human mind is capable.
