It was a mad, mad, mad world....

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.
  The victim in that case was the distinguished pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), a perceptive writer on music, one of Mendelssohn's teachers, and an early champion of the then difficult music of Beethoven (for whom he prepared the piano score of Fidelio).  It is impossible to know what exactly caused Moscheles' fine musical mind to snap in the last decade of his life, but snap it did, for in 1861 Moscheles published his Studies in Melodious Counterpoint Op.137a in which he composed a cello obbligato accompaniment for ten preludes and fugues from Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier.  What makes Moscheles' case more pathological than Schumann's is that Schumann can be granted at least a modicum of rational thought if his composition is viewed as an attempt to bring out the implied counterpoint in Bach's works for a non-polyphonic instrument.  No such excuse is possible in the case of Moscheles.

The discovery of the Moscheles case was not the end of my surprises.  There was the additional (if modest) surprise in how I made this discovery.  Of course I know that Schumann's defacement of Bach's works has been recorded (probably more than once), and I am pretty sure the same holds for Moscheles's display of musical insanity (I haven't checked).  To me such recordings are no more objectionable than countless case studies published by practicing psychiatrists and neurologists, which is to say not at all.  But my discovery came through the recording of a public concert whose program featured two of the Moscheles pieces.  And this communal postmortem of Moschels' musical freakout struck me, I must confess, as faintly immoral.  Not as objectionable, to be sure, as, say, installing a webcam inside a psychiatric asylum and sending the video feed to YouTube, but still somewhat unsettling.

Perhaps I'm making way too much of all this, too much of Bach's musical divinity, too much of Moscheles' take on Bach, and perhaps also way too little of the aesthetic standards prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century.  If so, I still think it is worthwhile to offer these concert performances of Moscheles' Op.137a (Nos.3 and 6)**, if only because they may offer a visceral illustration of what Charles Rosen might have meant by "a different logic" of the Romantic artist, mad or otherwise.

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*  Rosen, C., The Romantic Generation, Harvard U. Press, 1995, pp.647-648.
**  Lucia Swarts (cello), Leo van Doesselaar (piano), recorded in concert on 29 January 2012 at the De Doelen, Rotterdam.