# Composers with schizophrenia



## demiangel (Sep 15, 2010)

Have there been any classical composers who have been accused of being schizophrenics, psychotics, or otherwise completely bonkers?

I enjoy making music, and I've been accused of having schizophrenia. I've also accused modern society as being schizophrenic in it's essence, as if the universe had gone schizophrenic, with the "Enlightenment" and post-Enlightenment philosophy allowing an individual to pick a side and part-take of whatever delusions he desires...Nowhere is the schizophrenia in the "aether" more apparent than in modern art...I think if you have not been accused of being a schizophrenic, you are not really in tune with how things have been since the late 1800s...or at least you do not speak about what you have discovered.

Composers like Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg make music that sounds schizophrenic, which reflects the essence of modernity before it can be channeled into opposing viewpoints, as it does when the raw "will" of modernity is translated into dualistic thought. It is the raw, clashing, lawless essence before it's streamlined into arguments, or into valuations about good or evil, correct or incorrect, the studied use of some primal chaos which allows as much promise for a higher order to emerge in the future even as it threatens the destruction of everything. And yet, these people are able to formulate it into a rigid system which unravels the relationships between tones. It's as if their music is not really random, but is a gigantic "NO!" to any attempt to establish standards of beauty, to say "this note and this note go beautifully together", which REQUIRES that each note be treated as equally as any other note, and that no note be emphasized more than any other. Likewise, in our world, ideas interact with each other, but as with the music, there is no "victorious idea" which stands above all and says "I have swam through a sea of competing truths, an endless abyss of false knowledge and reached the other shore with Truth as it's reward"...perhaps this is yet to emerge? And maybe a more perfectly beautiful musical system will emerge around the same time 

So, composers...with schizophrenia? Google turns up no results.:lol:


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Bonkers: Hans Rott. Unfortunately.

"Rott's mind snapped in October 1880, whilst on a train journey. He was reported to have threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881".


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Robert Schumann, the obvious candidate. He didn't write _that much_ music, relatively speaking. Must have been busy thinking about other stuff in life that drove him mad.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Scriabin was completely crazy, according to Horowitz. 
About his unfinished Misterium:



> "There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."
> 
> Scriabin intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by "nobler beings".


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterium_%28Scriabin%29

I don't know if Stockhausen was schizophrenic or mad but he was, at least, a bit "eccentric". I know some weird stories about him


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## karenpat (Jan 16, 2009)

Never heard of a schizophrenic composer although I have heard detailed claims that Mozart had tourettes syndrome and how it's reflected in his music.

If we're going to guess a composer's mental struggles from his music, maybe some minimalist composers would be diagnosed with OCD...:lol:

Jokes aside, I think it's an interesting subject.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

I don't think Hugo Wolf was schizophrenic, but he was psychotic, and ended up dying in an asylum.

Does anyone here think Prokofiev was a little crazy?


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## Delicious Manager (Jul 16, 2008)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Does anyone here think Prokofiev was a little crazy?


I've never heard or thought this. Why do you ask?


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Delicious Manager said:


> I've never heard or thought this. Why do you ask?


_NEVER_??? :lol:

I think it like every time I hear _anything_ by him. hahaha!

Perhaps he wasn't clinically crazy, but he was definitely eccentric in a major way, plus a spiritual fanatic. At one point, he was terrified of demons (perhaps they haunted him), and at another point, he didn't believe them to even exist, or anything evil.

I think it takes a little bit of craziness to actually compose some of the stuff he did.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

The only crazy thing Prokofiev did was return to Russia - I daresay he waved away the warnings of fellow-emigres in his usual icily-superior manner but to go back when he did was bad, bad timing...and it ended up breaking him.


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## Delicious Manager (Jul 16, 2008)

elgars ghost said:


> The only crazy thing Prokofiev did was return to Russia - I daresay he waved away the warnings of fellow-emigres in his usual icily-superior manner but to go back when he did was bad, bad timing...and it ended up breaking him.


This did turn-out to be something of a bad move, executed at a time shortly before the first of Stalin's rants about 'socialist realism' (whatever THAT was - no-one ever bothered to explain it). Many people would probably be surprised to learn that Prokofiev's _Romeo and Juliet _ (arguably his masterpiece) had a very difficult creative birth while, in 1936, Prokofiev was commissioned to write the music for two major melodrama based on Pushkin's verse novels _Yevgeny Oneyegin_ (Eugene Onegin) and _Boris Godunov_ and a film of _The Queen of Spades_ in celebration of the Pushkin centenary in 1937, only to have ALL of them scrapped by Stalin's authorities at the last minute. Musical numbers from these abortive projects can be found re-used in many of Prokofiev's later works.


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## Toccata (Jun 13, 2009)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> Robert Schumann, the obvious candidate. He didn't write _that much_ music, relatively speaking. Must have been busy thinking about other stuff in life that drove him mad.


I don't agree that Schumann "didn't write that much music relatively speaking". Looking at my collections, which are close to being 100% complete for most of the big-name composers, his output compares very well against the likes of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and several others from the Romantic era. He is streets ahead of the likes of Mahler and Bruckner.

I accept that his output isn't in the same super league as Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bach but it's respectable enough in overall size. What's more his output is nicely balanced across most of the musical genres, unlike say Wagner who was the one-trick pony par excellence.

For Schumann, not counting counting duplicates, I have: chamber music = 6 hours; orchestral 6+ hours; choral 7+ hours; paino solo 11 hours. Most of it, to my tastes, is very good if not excellent. In fact, there's hardly any of his work which I dislike. It's more appealing than a lot of the material produced by later Romantics, including some of Brahms output. And his piano solo is far more appealing than all the itsy-bits of this & that produced by Chopin.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I agree Schumann wrote more than perhaps some people think - nearly 150 'official' op nos in c. 35 years, which easily outpaces Brahms whose acknowledged output of 120-odd op nos spans about 10 years more. The amount of lieder Schumann composed in the one year of 1840 alone is mind-boggling in itself.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Would be interesting to find the average no. Of works.


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## Toccata (Jun 13, 2009)

elgars ghost said:


> I agree Schumann wrote more than perhaps some people think - nearly 150 'official' op nos in c. 35 years, which easily outpaces Brahms whose acknowledged output of 120-odd op nos spans about 10 years more. The amount of lieder Schumann composed in the one year of 1840 alone is mind-boggling in itself.


I don't think the number of works is the best measure of output, but rather the number of hours of music.

Like I said, I have nearly 100% coverage of all the major composers' outputs. For Schumann, the total number of hours-worth of music is nearly 31 and for Brahms 29. Thus, they each wrote about the same amount of music translated into playing time. Brahms wrote rather more chamber music than Schumann: 11 hours vis-a-vis 6 hours. But Schumann wrote more for solo piano: 10 hours vis a vis 5 hours. Their orchestral output is more similar but Brahms takes the edge. Schumann's choral works of various sort exceed Brahms.

Side-tracking a bit, Brahms, of course, was not just a big admirer of Beethoven but he greatly esteemed the work of Schumann. And both Brahms and Schumann were much impressed not just with Beethoven but also with the works of Schubert, in respect of many whose works they both did much to unearth and publicise. If it hadn't been for the efforts of first Schumann and and then Brahms, the full treasures of Schubert's works may have lain undiscovered for much longer, and in some cases perhaps not discovered at all. It was not until much later 19th C, well after the death of Schumann, that all or most of Schubert's output became catalogued. I wouldn't mind betting that they both felt inferior to Schubert, as well as Beethoven.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

norman bates said:


> Scriabin was completely crazy, according to Horowitz.
> About his unfinished Misterium:
> 
> "There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."
> ...


:lol:

As crazy as this quote sounds on the surface in a strange way it also seems equally genius to me.


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## mueske (Jan 14, 2009)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> I don't think Hugo Wolf was schizophrenic, but he was psychotic, and ended up dying in an asylum.
> 
> Does anyone here think Prokofiev was a little crazy?


Schizophrenia _is_ a psychosis just to clear that up.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Not many composers had schizophrenia, but plenty had depression - Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Malcolm Arnold to name three. For the last two, serious alcohol problems also clouded their lives...


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## the_emptier (Jan 27, 2011)

I think there are a lot of composers with underlying problems of all sorts, but that applies to anyone really. I think it all just adds to their compositions, if they can handle it that way


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