Musical Creativity and the Psychopathology of the Composing Mind

Anthony Cantle

The four day 12th International Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia which took place at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, London in October, 1997 under the title of Building Bridges involved several Psychoanalysts from London. Dr David Bell, the late Dr Michael Conran, Prof Christopher Cordess, Dr Giovanna Di Ceglie, Dr Murray Jackson, Dr Gabriel Kirtchuk ,Dr Richard Lucas, Dr Brian Martindale, Mr David Morgan, Ms Valerie Sinason, Dr Leslie Sohn and Prof Paul Williams each gave papers. One of the more unusual collaborative presentations was that given by the Israeli born pianist and musicologist Yaron Shavit, who lectured from the keyboard, and Anthony Cantle of the British Psychoanalytical Society, who introduced and chaired a musical analysis of Robert Schumann’s last piano composition ‘Gesange Der Frühe’. A cassette recording of the entire lecture, including a performance of the work itself and some of the discussion, is now available but a synopsis of Yaron Shavit’s lecture together with Anthony Cantle’s brief introductory paper is reprinted below.

When Brian Martindale asked me to speak tonight, to introduce and chair this event - a musical analysis of Schumann’s late piano compositions - I confess to being in something of a dilemma, about which I will say more in a moment. However, judging by the attendance tonight there can be no doubting the interest people have in this whole subject area of musical creativity and the psychopathology of the composing mind.

Only a week ago The Barbican Centre here in London hosted a whole weekend devoted to the music of Schumann, where under the baton of John Elliot Gardner, some of Schumann’s less known works were rapturously received through an imaginative programme entitled ‘Schumann Revealed’. With the timing of this particular lecture tonight about Schumann, and with the conference itself featuring so well in yesterday’s ‘All in the Mind’ BBC Radio programme, our topicality is ensured.

The new recording by Stephen Isserlis of Schumann’s Cello Concerto has already been hailed as an interpretation that will at last secure the concerto, and here I am quoting one critic ‘...as one of the great poetic utterances of the romantic repertoire’. However, we should remember that the same work was not so long ago described as ‘meagre and stilted.’ Peter Cropper, the leader of the Lindsay Quartet, has described Haydn as ‘the most neglected of all the great composers’. Recently the music critic Stephen Johnson proposed Schumann as a close runner up when it came to neglected composers. Johnson suggested the basis for this neglect was twofold.

First, when it comes to orchestration Schumann is seen by many to be erratic, his choral writing unadventurous and his handling of large forms precarious. Second, and uncannily pre-emptive of Yaron Shavit’s talk tonight, Johnson cites Schumann’s failing mental health and final mental collapse as an important factor in shaping our perception of Schumann as a great composer. On Schumann’s later works Johnson writes; ‘they are intermittently inspired, but more often obsessive, repetitive - evidence of a mind in decline.’

Much admired by Mahler and detested by Wagner, an interest in the life and work of Schumann brings us together tonight under the scholarship of Yaron Shavit to learn more about the composer responsible for what Hans Keller has so succinctly called ‘spotless works of genius’.

How people hear music and understand composers is very varied and of necessity always subjective. For example, James Hurford, the architect responsible for this very conference centre, and who died in January this year, could be quite scathing in his very strong views about certain composers, having time for some and loathing others. For example, he once dismissed Mozart as ‘a composer who might have been quite good if he’d lived long enough’. Presumably, if the ceiling falls in tonight we can take it that he had an even lower opinion of Schumann!

I know that we are going to hear tonight an extremely interesting presentation and one which will stimulate us to think and to consider. This brings me to the dilemma to which I referred earlier. Now, an international conference on Psychosis is probably quite a dangerous place for me to say this, but I feel in two minds about my task tonight. It may seem a strange thing for a psychoanalyst to be saying but I prefer not to think too seriously about music, at least not when I am listening to any. Music for me is an emotional experience and not a cerebral event, one which I want to enjoy and to learn from. A place of sanctuary for my imagination. What Tolstoy meant, I think, when he said ‘Music is the shorthand of emotion.’  Others might disagree.

I feel pretty much the same way about composers and their states of mind. That Tchaikovsky was homosexual is not a factor in my mind when listening to his string quartet or fourth symphony; that an elderly Bruckner was rather partial to young women seems to offer no obvious impediment to the glories of his symphonies any more than Freud’s diagnosis of Mahler’s Holy Mary Complex has to be a distraction from the adoration of the feminine in his 8th symphony,

Herbert Graf, better known to many of us as Little Hans, the five year old analysed at arms length by Freud, went on, we should remember, to become a successful opera producer with productions at Covent Garden, Salzburg and the New York Met during which time he is said to have inflicted on all around him those unwanted aspects of his personality that may have escaped Freud’s attention many years earlier.

I often feel very uneasy when things said and written about a particular composer s psychopathology end up acquiring a status that eclipses the legacy of their musical creativity. Some of this can take the form of sensible discussion with a serious intent. Other examples border on the absurd or the pretentious. Talking of the absurd and pretentious, there’s a story that some years ago when the legendary Russian pianist Emil Gilels was touring in the USA an obese Texan approached Gilels at a record signing session. Heaping one praise upon another for Gilels and his craft and claiming to possess an equally obese personal record collection and an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things musical, the Texan was about to leave the record store with his latest Gilels recording when he turned back and said ‘by the way Maestro, having this opportunity to meet you in person allows me the chance to settle once and for all something that has puzzled me for years; what exactly is the correct pronunciation - is it Schumann or Schubert?’

The psychiatrist Peter Ostwald was a serious devotee of what regrettably has come to be called ‘performing-arts medicine’. His book on Schumann appeared twelve years ago. His new book, completed just before he died, on the eccentric but brilliant pianist, Glen Gould entitled ‘The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius’ has just been published. Let me take just one small point to try to illustrate the concern I am wishing to represent.

For years the received wisdom as to why Gould adopted a very strange posture at the keyboard, and supported by a chair just 14 inches high, was that this was due to his sitting closely with his mother at the piano in his early years. Coffee table Freud you might say, and you would be right, and about this and other matters Ostwald disabuses us of one piece of popular theorizing and instead asserts that the playing posture was taught to Gould by his piano teacher, by all accounts a Chilean of rigid habit. But what is the authority and context for this book? Apparently it was based on a ‘friendship’ with Gould. However, as one reviewer in this country has already been quick to remark, the author and Gould met only once in the fifteen years preceding Gould’s death in 1982.

A recently published paper on Maurice Ravel found its author - a psychiatrist - seeking to analyse Ravel’s Bolero as an example of musical perseveration. According to this author, a single melody in the work is reminiscent of Ravel’s ‘Basque origins.’ But what does that really mean? We are told that later in the composition the sudden collapse of the melody is reminiscent of, and I quote, ‘a sexual orgasm or death, leaving the listener to cope with his own throbbing pain, fear and excitement’.

Personally, I find this kind of reasoning unconvincing. The paper’s thesis is that the perseveration of obsessive rhythm is one of the most striking features in patients with fronto-temporal atrophy. Ravel died following a poorly planned neurological procedure, which aimed at excluding a cerebral tumour. There was no post mortem. How will we ever know for sure? And to whom will it matter if and when we ever do? And will it affect our experience of the music?

When pressed to be definitive about the emotion in his Sonata for flute, viola and harp, Debussy replied and I quote ‘...it is so terribly melancholy that I cannot say whether the listener should laugh or cry. Perhaps both.’ Likewise, when a BBC interviewer asked the Irish playwright, the late Brendan Behan what was the central message that he was trying to deliver in his writings; he replied, ‘I am a writer not a fucking postman’. Holbrook cites the occasion when a woman who asked Schumann, after listening to him play a piece, ‘what did it mean?’ - whereupon Schumann remained silent and simply played the piece again.

Bion’s observation that the answer is the enemy of the question acquires, I suggest, a particular relevance when trying to evaluate most artists work. Didn’t Freud himself once say that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.

Bion has helped us to keep clearly in mind those in our own profession who are simply too intelligent ever to hope of becoming wise, and urged us to remember the technically proficient violinist who was incapable of being a musician. Bion has also sharpened our appreciation of how yesterday’s facts and the knowledge associated with them can become today’s doubts and creative uncertainties.

For example only this week, Dr James Nashold, a neurosurgeon in North Carolina, offers us the interesting claim that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at age 39 in 1953, did so as a result of a doctor's error and not as most of us in this lecture theatre have been brought up to believe, that he died from excessive drinking. Nashold contends that Thomas’s American physician mistook a diabetic coma for a drunken stupor and later wrongly prescribed a course of injections including Cortisone, Morphine and Benzedrine.

So perhaps I may at this point invoke a chairman’s prerogative and make a small plea for us all to exercise restraint when it comes to our discussion. I say this because this theatre is full of clinicians of one kind or another and we are all very used to and probably very skilled at speculating about and trying to understand the minds and behaviour of others. At the discussion stage perhaps we can engage with each other but keep in mind that Mr Shavit is presenting a musical exploration about Schumann and not giving us the definitive last word and, furthermore, he is a musician and not a psychiatrist.

Likewise, our instrument of understanding tonight is the piano and not the consulting room and the patient, Herr Schumann, was never treated by anyone in this lecture theatre and has now been dead for 141 years during which time the science and understanding of mental illness has developed enormously. Finally, in the days before the Patient’s Charter we might think that clinical record keeping may have not received the same priority as it does today in our increasingly litigious world.

When we come to the discussion later on I hope we can keep in mind Freud’s own observations in his paper on Wild Psychoanalysis, published in 1910. He says:

‘Besides all this, one may sometimes make a wrong surmise, and one is never in a position to discover the whole truth.’

Our discussion of Schumann relies on historical reconstruction and musical scholarship; inevitably it is driven by inference and not by direct observation. Did Murray Perahia, the internationally renowned pianist, have these injunctions in mind, I wonder, when only the other week he went on record (forgive the pun please) to defend Schumann from populist theorizing. He said, and I quote, ‘Psychoanalysis of Schumann’s life is too facile. It gets a bit tiresome because it leaves no mystery when there is a lot of mystery’.

Well there’s no mystery about our presenter and soloist this evening, Yaron Shavit. When reviewing his debut recital at the 1996 Edinburgh Festival, where together with the acclaimed Albanian soprano Besa Berberi they performed an enthralling programme consisting of Verdi’s Six Romances and Schumann’s Poems of Mary Queen of Scots, the music critic of The Scotsman described Yaron Shavit as a ‘master’ and went on in fulsome praise to speak of his tremendous pianistic skill when it came to developing the necessary colours and dimensions so vital in any intimate music making between singer and accompanist.

Yaron Shavit was born in Israel but for the last fifteen years, together with his family, he has lived and worked here in London. He is married to the psychoanalyst, Naomi Shavit. He studied musicology at Bar-Ilan University and later at the Free University of Brussels. His piano studies also took him to the Guildhall School of Music, London. As well being both a composer and a very fine musician, he is a much sought after teacher, both in this country and abroad. Apart from individual teaching, he is very well known for his regular music seminars through which he enables enthusiastic non-musicians to acquire a deeper understanding and appreciation of one of the great joys of life that we abbreviate and simply call music.

His creativity seems to find a natural home in projects far and wide and this includes the remoter corners of the repertoire as well as the more familiar. Indeed, I recall with affection that some years ago he had a particularly endearing explanation for being unable to attend my own wedding; an explanation that happened to be at the same time both novel and true. He had to fly to Israel to record a new compact disc for the Kibbutz Movement League of Composers, a recording of music that celebrated instead the marriage of the tuba and piano. I am sure you will understand me when I say that others invited to the wedding, but unable to come, had far less original explanations.

His interests extend well beyond the keyboard and embrace the scholarship of ideas that is so often to be found influencing generations of composers; ideas drawn from literature, philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis. Perhaps more particularly in the last discipline, that of psychoanalysis, we find Yaron Shavit “building bridges” long before someone else thought up the same title for this week’s conference.

Perhaps this is best illustrated through the series of musical events held in recent years and organised by The Tavistock Society of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists, a series concerned with exploring the tripartite and often complex relationship between a composer, his personality, and the process of composition. Little surprise, therefore, that he was sought for this session and we are very pleased that he has agreed to come and speak, and to play for us tonight.

Through his teaching and in particular the series to which I have just referred, he has sought to shed some new light, but always by using the torch of the music itself, on the world of Brahms, Mahler, Schumann and Sibelius to name just a few. The titles of two of these lecture concerts undoubtedly speak for themselves in conveying the kind of fresh angle adopted by Yaron Shavit when approaching familiar composers and often via their less familiar compositions. For example, on Brahms - ‘Creativity in the life of a reclusive man yearning for togetherness’; on Sibelius - ‘The silencing of creativity’.

Well, thank you for your patience; we now reach the point where the silencing of my introduction can make way for the creativity of this next session concerned with the late compositions of Robert Schumann; Gesange Der Frühe (Songs of Dawn - Songs of Morning). Please join me in welcoming our guest speaker this evening, the pianist and musicologist, Yaron Shavit.

 

Anthony Cantle
October, 1997
 

Robert Schumann’s ‘Gesange Der Frühe’ Op.l33
A Work of Genius or a Manifestation of a Deteriorating Mental State?

Yaron Shavit, London

About two years prior to his death, Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) had composed a set of five piano pieces which he entitled ‘Gesange Der Frühe’ - Songs of the Dawn. As he himself described them in his letter to his publisher: