Madness, for the Romantic artist ... promised not only different insights but also a different logic.
CHARLES ROSEN *
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Writing about Robert Schumann, Charles Rosen tells us that
Schumann was haunted from the age of seventeen by the fear of going mad. Only at the end of his short life were these fears realized. In 1854 ... Schumann voluntarily incarcerated himself in an insane asylum.*
Rosen's chronology is correct with respect to Schumann the man, but not Schumann the composer. The latter should have committed himself to an asylum a couple of years earlier when he displayed undeniable symptoms of musical lunacy by composing piano accompaniment to Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin BWV 1001- 1006. Had Schumann produced this composition a few decades later, it could have been considered a musical counterpart of Eugene Bataille's La Joconde fumant le pipe or Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. in the visual arts, making Schumann (rather than Eric Satie) the father of musical dadaism. But composed in the middle of the nineteenth century, this work of Schumann has always struck me as by far the most shocking (and, because it was Schumann, the saddest) case of madness from the Romantic period in the history of music.
Or so I thought until a few days ago when, to my great surprise, I came across a case of nineteenth century musical madness arguably more pathological than Schumann's.
