Courage, not madness, is the mark of genius

A drawing of Frederic Chopin (Photo: Rex)

"Hallucinations are bad enough,” wrote Hunter S Thompson. “But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.” The world’s most famous junkie journalist may have been telling the truth or he may have been bluffing. (He did, after all, end up blowing his brains out.) For most people, however, there is nothing more frightening than a hallucination.

Frederic Chopin was giving a recital in 1848 when he left the stage midway through his Piano Sonata in B flat minor. The composer had just spotted “cursed creatures” emerging from underneath the half-open lid of the piano. In fact, he was often tormented by visions, and this week the journal Medical Humanities suggested that he had temporal lobe epilepsy, which produces just the sort of “complex visual hallucinations” that scared him witless during that recital.

Our first reaction should be one of sympathy. Imagine coping with epilepsy on top of tuberculosis, the disease that killed Chopin in the following year. But it’s also intriguing that the phantoms should make their appearance during that particular sonata. The “Funeral March” slow movement is disturbing enough, but even spookier is the finale, in which the pianist’s hands fly around the keyboard making a sound so hushed and blurry that you almost have to cup your ear to catch it.

“Wind howling around the gravestones,” is how Arthur Rubinstein described the effect. It’s the most hallucinatory piece of music that anyone had yet composed. Did playing the sonata drag Chopin’s demons out of the piano? Did he write it in the first place because he suffered from hallucinations induced by epilepsy? Now that we’ve been reminded of Chopin’s phantoms, perhaps we should bear them in mind when we hear his later works, listening for their spectral whispers.

Then again, we could save ourselves the effort. Most speculation about the effect of sickness or personal tragedy on classical music is misleading, verging on psychobabble or junk history. When you think about it, only a simple-minded composer would write happy music when he was happy and sad music when he was sad. Bach was capable of producing cantata movements of toe-tapping joyfulness right after the death of one of his children – and he lost 10 of them. Many of Beethoven’s loveliest melodies were set down during a period of his life when he was behaving like a madman, ragingly drunkenly against imaginary enemies. (History is so preoccupied by his deafness that it tends to overlook his alcohol consumption: the counterpoint of the Hammerklavier seems even more miraculous when you consider that it was probably written by a man wincing from a hangover.)

This isn’t to deny the shocking depth of anguish experienced by so many famous composers. For example, Schubert must have known from his mid-twenties that syphilis would kill him, although he died before it could turn him into a dribbling wreck, which is what happened to Schumann. Both men wrote sublimely happy music in times of misery. But did they and other composers draw on their bad experiences when, later on, they deliberately set out to create a tragic mood?

The answer must be yes, they did sometimes. It’s only human nature. In the end, however, the power of the composer doesn’t lie in his ability to map out personal misery – or joy – on the stave. It’s rooted in a combination of technical skill, uncanny imagination and courage. Arguably, Shostakovich would have been an even greater artist if he hadn’t allowed his fear of death to intrude so crudely into his late works. Beethoven and Bruckner felt the fear, too. But they transcended it with music whose hard-won serenity makes sense of their suffering. And so did Chopin, despite the demons crawling out of his piano.