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.
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