Though Schumann, who died in 1856 at the age of 46, has received fewer diagnoses than Mozart, his case is messier, and the stakes are higher. Discussions of Mozart’s final illness are confined to the physical: infection, cardiovascular disease, kidney function and poisoning. They do not affect our view of his compositions, except for the Requiem, and then only in terms of the circumstances of its commissioning.
For Mozart the medical and the musical remain separate. In Schumann’s case the usual diagnoses have included mental illnesses. Because associations between mental state and creativity are inevitable, stigmas and stereotypes attached to psychiatric illnesses have long influenced the interpretation of Schumann’s music.
During the last two decades concerts featuring music by “bipolar” composers, including Schumann, have flourished. Prominent ensembles like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the National Symphony have brought this concept to large audiences, and in May the Baltimore Symphony is to present “Schumann’s beautiful Mind,” a program exploring that mind, “beset by bipolar disorder yet still able to produce some of classical music’s most original and inspired work.”
In academia, by contrast, since the 1980s a host of musicological studies have tried to defend Schumann’s late works against those who find traces of pathology in them.
Concerts that promise a bipolar experience and studies that locate “health” in his scores not only refashion biography, they also affect habits of listening. Retrospective psychiatric diagnoses shape the way people listen and what they hear.
Take the 2004 DVD “Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann,” a Touchstar Productions video of a lecture and performance by Richard Kogan, a Cornell University professor of psychiatry and Julliard-trained pianist. In it he contends that “Carnaval,” Schumann’s Opus 9, “could not have been written by someone who did not suffer from bipolar disorder.” It is, he adds, “practically a catalog of bipolar symptomatology.”
The way Schumann’s music flits from idea to idea in that suite of short pieces, Kogan argues, is an exteriorization of the disorganized and illogical thought processes that typify manic episodes. Linking short excerpts to depressive and manic moods, Kogan seeks to isolate the actual sounds of psychiatric disorder. It’s a lesson in medico-musical listening.
The use of Schumann’s music as diagnostic evidence has a long history. In 1906 the German psychiatrist Paul Julius Mobius, who was a proponent of the idea that mental illness was a symptom of hereditary degeneration, published a “pathographie” of the composer. “Listening to Schumann’s music,” Mobius wrote, “instructs one that Schumann was an extremely nervous person.
” It seems evident, “ he added, ” that from youth onward Schumann was mentally ill. “
His diagnosis was dementia praecox, an illness soon renamed schizophrenia.
Previously most commentators had repeated the diagnosis of Franz Richarz, Schumann’s doctor at the Endenich mental asylum, who reported that Schumann had died of progressive paralysis brought on by overwork and exhaustion. As Richarz’s diagnosis became better known, commentary citing the ” exhaustion “ present in Schumann’s late music began to surface.
And so, as the Schumann scholar John Daverio reported, prominent musical figures like the critic Eduard Hanslick and the violinist Joseph Joachim (to whom Schumann dedicated his Violin Concerto) helped popularize the notion that the late works suffered from exhaustion. so while psychiatrists listened to Schumann’s music for evidence of illness, musicians began using psychiatric diagnoses to aid their assessments of musical quality.
Mobius’ work brought about a reconceptualization of Schumann’s health history. A hereditary illness like schizophrenia or manic-depressive disorder, unlike exhaustion, could leave traces throughout a composer’s output, not just in the late works. The early popularization of these diagnoses was aided by a changing orientation in German psychiatric research toward biological models that favored the hereditary transmission of mental illness over environmental factors.
In the early decades of the 20th century scientific consensus on the inheritability of mental illness helped fuel fear over the threat posed by genetic ” degeneration. “ Combined with the belief that nervous diseases were on the rise, fear of degeneracy served to increase the authority of eugenics. Famous forensic psychiatrists like Cesare Lombroso, the Italian professor of criminal anthropology, asserted a connection between genius and mental instability.
In Germany several studies on the inheritance of musical ability followed. The most painstakingly detailed in relation to Schumann was a 1925 article that sought to delineate hereditary laws governing musical ability. almost 100 of Schumann’s relatives were evaluated as being musical or not. In Schumann’s case, studies on the transmission of musical ability containing family trees and calculations of genetic inheritance were shadowed by the question of ” pathological inheritance. “
Such inheritance remained a sinister obsession of German psychiatry during the 1930s and ’40s. Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power a law mandated sterilization for anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness (to name just two diseases often diagnosed in Schumann). By 1945 almost 400,000 people had undergone forced sterilization. At least 70,000 had been murdered. all the while the accomplishments of German composers, including Schumann, were upheld as evidence of German biological superiority.
Schumann’s death in a mental asylum thus posed a problem for psychiatry and propaganda under the Nazis. The premiere of his late Violin Concerto in 1937 was in part an attempt by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, to introduce a replacement for the racially banned Mendelssohn’s much-loved concerto. so a 1943 medical dissertation that said Schumann had suffered from vascular dementia (small strokes brought on by hypertension) rather than schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness found ready acceptance. It absolved Schumann and his family from the taint of hereditary mental illness. Despite a dearth of evidence, the hypertension diagnosis lingered on in medical and musicological discourse until the mid-1980s. After World War II work by English-speaking scholars became more prominent. In the 1950s the British psychiatrists Eliot Slater and Alfred Meyer argued for manic-depressive illness followed by syphilis. like many before them, they turned to Schumann’s music to buttress their arguments, but they used it in a novel way, as a source of quantitative data. Schumann’s productivity (measured in opus numbers per year) fluctuated over time, they noticed. Matching those records to reports of Schumann’s mood, they correlated years of elation with high productivity and depression with meager accomplishment.
Their work has sparked the wide popularity of the bipolar hypothesis, yet it is rife with dubious assumptions. does mental state change with the calendar year? does each opus represent the same amount of work? are pieces necessarily begun and completed within the same calendar year? What about unpublished works?
The study made a seductive claim. It could transform Schumann’s music — the source of endlessly conflicting interpretations — into objective data that could be graphed or charted. such thinking captured musicological attention by way of Slater’s contribution to a 1972 collection of essays on Schumann, and it reached a wider public in part through the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.
Jamison’s popular 1993 book, ” Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament “ (Free Press), uses Schumann as an example of the many famous artists she says suffered from the illness. It is probably the best-known study to argue for connections between bipolar disorder and genius. Performances and marketing of ” manic-depressive music “ are largely indebted to her work.
In 1991 Schumann’s mysteriously lost medical records from the Endenich asylum resurfaced. Aribert Reimann, a Berlin composer whose grandfather’s sister had married a son of Richarz, Schumann’s doctor, inherited the records on the condition he keep them secret. Reimann eventually offered them to the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
In 2006, 150 years after Schumann’s death, the records were published in their entirety (except for a few missing pages presumed to have been lost during World War II). Many scholars believe they indicate that Schumann died of neurosyphilis. But because conclusive diagnosis of syphilis was not possible until the early 20th century, the records cannot resolve all diagnostic disagreements. Published alongside the records are analyses whose conflicting readings dispel notions that the records relay straightforward or easy truths.
The medical records are difficult to decode because descriptions and interpretations of psychiatric symptoms occur within specific historical and geographic contexts. this is as true today as it was in Schumann’s time, as a glance at different editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will readily confirm. The complex and incomplete epistolary, musical and medical texts we use to study Schumann’s life will continue to elicit diverse, even contradictory readings. As much as the diagnoses have introduced new audiences to Schumann’s life and works, we will never achieve consensus on what he really had.