Can anyone beat Frederic Chopin as an emblem of the Romantic artist? In the great Polish composer, towering genius combined with a wasted frame and a pallid face behind which lurked melancholy, a brooding over death, a disconnection from ordinary life and sometimes horrifying hallucinations.
A force that created this image was the French novelist George Sand, who described how her lover, cursed by prodigy and doomed by frailty to an early grave, would be shaken by ghostly visions.
“The phantoms called him, clasped him, and instead of seeing his father and his friend smile at him in the ray of faith, he repelled their fleshless faces from his own and struggled under the grasp of their icy hands,” Sand wrote.
However, a study by a pair of Spanish neurologists tarnishes this compelling gothic tableau. Chopin’s hallucinations probably had more to do with a medical condition than the burden of the Romantic artist, it suggests. The study was published on Monday in Medical Humanities.
Manuel Vazquez Caruncho and Francisco Branas Fernandez of the Xeral-Calde Hospital Complex in Lugo draw this conclusion after sifting through contemporary accounts and Chopin’s letters.
In 1848, at a concert at a private house in Manchester, England, Chopin was playing his Sonata in B flat minor when he abruptly left the room but returned a short while later to finish the piece.
In a letter to George Sand’s daughter, which has never been published in any collection of his correspondence, Chopin explained that he had been terrified to see “cursed creatures” emerging from the half-open case of his piano.
In other accounts by Sand and one of his pupils, Madame Streicher, Chopin was sometimes seized by a mental state that would leave him wild-eyed and his hair literally standing on end.
He himself described himself sometimes as being in a dreamy state — in “imaginary spaces” — and once said he felt “like steam.”
The doctors looked through the psychiatric states that could possibly explain the great composer’s problems. They ruled out schizophrenia because it usually takes the form of voices. Migraines can induce hallucinations, but these can last up to half an hour, whereas Chopin’s episodes were brief, and lasted only a few minutes or even seconds.
Another disease called Charles Bonnet syndrome was excluded, because it is linked to eye disorders, and there was no evidence that Chopin suffered from these.
This leaves epilepsy of the temporal lobes, whose seizures can unleash brief, stereotyped visions of the kind experienced by Chopin and a condition called jamais vu, or a dream-like disconnection from one’s surroundings.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS