| Did Mozart Have Tourette Syndrome?
"Prevent your burdening yourself with such useless people[who] go about the world like beggars," Empress Maria Theresa warned her son, Archduke Ferdinand. It's shocking nowadays to realize that the Hapsburg monarch was referring to one of the world's greatest musical geniuses, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and his family, who during several visits to her court had tried desperately to secure an imperial appointment for the gifted but bizarrely eccentric young composer--ultimately, without success.
This is just one of many contemporary accounts through which author Benjamin Simkin traces the sharp discrepancy between Mozart's sublime music and bizarre personality in his book, Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana.
Simkin begins with an unabashedly adoring study of Mozart's seminal works, showing how the young Wunderkind established early prototypes for the great works that would quickly follow. In addition to Mozart's well-known orchestral works, Simkin looks at some of Mozart's lesser-known "society music"--serenades, cassations, concerted songs, and dance music--and finds there some of the most carefully crafted music ever written, entertainment music that rose to the summit of high art.
But throughout Mozart's brief but brilliant career Simkin finds letters and journalistic entries to, from, and about Mozart that present a disturbing picture of the young genius's mind. We see Mozart fidgeting compulsively, talking nonsense and delighting in word-play and the coarsest bathroom humor, and even leaping about the room miaowing like a cat. As Mozart's friends describe him, his eccentricity would make Tom Hulce's giddy portrayal in the film Amadeus seem reserved by comparison.
To Simkin, an endocrinologist emeritus at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, such accounts are clues to a psychiatric understanding that would have been impossible during Mozart's lifetime, two hundred years ago. Simkin compares Mozart's medical history with that of other family members, finding a triad of perfect pitch, hyperactivity, and migraine headaches. He also compares Mozart's letters and friends' accounts of his behavior with modern accounts of and by clinical psychiatric patients, and reaches a startling conclusion: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may well have been afflicted with what is nowadays recognized as Tourette syndrome.
Indeed, as Simkin points out, Mozart's Tourettic quirks may have even contributed to some of his finest music. He hears "Tourettisms" in the sudden clashes of harmony and texture often found in Mozart's music, and in the kaleidoscopic mixture of simultaneous dances in the ballroom finale of Don Giovanni.
Without a living patient, Simkin's theory must remain speculation. But it was Tourette syndrome, Simkin says, and not the machinations of rival composer Antonio Salieri, as the movie suggested, that got Mozart blackballed by Empress Maria Theresa and that made him the irrepressible creative genius that he certainly was.
Read a review of this book from JAMA! |
