Many of the indelible experiences of my life have come while performing Robert Schumann’s works. His music is poetic, emotionally direct even in its stranger moments and suggestive of deep vulnerability: a unique and potent combination. On the concert stage, where everything becomes more highly charged, it can be overwhelming.
Earlier this month, I played his piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I came offstage feeling altered, as I so often do after performing Schumann’s music — as if I had seen his innermost self and, in the process, accessed my own. Moments later, in the green room, I heard the questions I’ve grown accustomed to but still steel myself against: Had Schumann already gone mad when he wrote this work? Can I hear the madness in the music?
Schumann did indeed suffer from severe mental illness; he was institutionalized for the last years of his life. And there is no denying that as his condition worsened, the character of his music changed: It turned inward and grew increasingly static, still conveying his essence but somehow more aloof from the listener. And yet these questions always bother me. They reduce this beautiful, complicated, staggeringly gifted person to a pathology.
More dangerously, they indicate a persistent and pernicious stereotype: the tortured artist. Think of the popular conception of the raging Beethoven, the anguished van Gogh, the volatile Caravaggio, the idiosyncratic Vladimir Horowitz, the guitar-smashing rock star.
This is a myth, one that has been useful for the promotion of artists — crazy, like sex, sells — but deeply damaging to the artists themselves. It is a myth that renders the artist simultaneously superhuman and less than fully human. He (the mythical artist is historically a he) does godlike things; he has no control over his impulses. He knows how to tame lions or conjure infinity; he cannot be expected to know how to tie his shoes. He is totally at home in the world of art; he is utterly out of place in the actual world.
Paradoxically, this presumption of emotional instability has made it not easier but more difficult for artists to be forthright about our mental health. We are fighting a preconception that disembodies us and has the potential to make us less employable. Carrying a whiff of untamability is romantic; revealing the sometimes profound struggle of making music and living life is a turnoff. Perhaps Schumann knew this: Often, he returned to his music after it had been published, removing many of the strangest — and sometimes most characteristic, and most beautiful — details. Maybe the fear of what they might reveal was too strong.
I certainly know it. In 2015, when I broke my arm and needed to cancel several weeks of concerts, no one suggested to me that I shouldn’t tell the truth about why. A few years later, when I was suffering from acute anxiety and had to cancel engagements, no one suggested to me that I should reveal why. A physical impairment was an unfortunate fact of life; a psychological one was beyond the pale.
This is not a good state of affairs. When you feel the need to hide a part of yourself from the world, you first try to hide it from yourself. When that proves impossible, you try to will it away. And when that inevitably fails, because you cannot will yourself to be someone other than yourself, you are left with shame. Shame at something that might have been perfectly manageable if you had only allowed yourself to manage it, and that is in any case not shameful.
The psychic cost of this stigma around discussing mental health is bad enough. No less lamentable is the artistic cost. Notwithstanding the years classical musicians spend in pursuit of more sophisticated understanding, more finely honed listening and more flexible technique, ultimately, all we have is openness and honesty. Or, more precisely, without that openness and honesty, all the technique and listening and understanding in the world amounts to little. The dancer Martha Graham reportedly spoke of the artist’s obligation to “keep the channel open,” to remain alert to one’s instincts, even when one doesn’t understand or like them. There is no surer route to closing that channel than denying a part of oneself.
Today, the winds may be changing. As athletes, politicians and actors have gone public with their mental health struggles, so too have musicians. Taken on its own, this is an unambiguous good: good for the well-being of musicians, good for the music and good for the audiences who come to listen to it. The shame is being lifted, the channel reopened.
Unfortunately, this progress, like much progress, is double-edged. If we aren’t careful, it may turn out not to be progress at all, but rather a new variation on an old theme. Whereas artists were once under pressure to appear invulnerable, impervious to the pressures of a performing career and the vagaries of life, today social media has created an equal and opposite pressure: to be available.
Today’s young musicians are being told by the institutions that train them and those that promote them that they need to pull back the curtain. They are told that the audience has a right not just to hear their sincerest artistry, but also to see everything that goes into it — the preparation, the blood, the sweat and especially the tears. They are asked to perform authenticity, which is different from and sometimes in direct opposition to authentic performance — a new kind of mask to replace the old one, and a new threat to the artist’s emotional well-being.
Music’s enormous and peculiar power comes in part from its abstraction. Vocal music aside, it includes neither words nor images. It cannot tell you what time it is or if it will rain or that you need to buy toothpaste. But its inability to be prosaic is connected to its extraordinary ability to be poetic.
As Schumann understood so well, music has a unique capacity for communicating the frailty that we all have in common. It need not be pathologized or valorized, hidden or paraded. It is an inevitability, whether one’s life is spent on the concert stage, backstage, in the audience or not going to concerts at all. Like music itself, this frailty is complicated, difficult and reminds us that we are human.
The post The Myth of the Mad Artist Is Harmful. I Should Know. appeared first on New York Times.
