Saturday, February 3, 2007

Mozart: Affliction and Art

Mozart, Self-Absorbed
M ozart often wrote to Leopold that certain variations or sections of his pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the piece to end.”
  —  Emanuel Ax
DSM: Is there any evidence that Mozart understood what it is like to be old? Well, yes! Think of his Requiem in D minor, K. 626. Not just the scope of what it means to grow old, but the nuances of progressive debility and loss are in this. Mozart also comprehended coercion and conflict—consider the dark power of some of his finest masterpieces, such as the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491. There is much evidence that he grasped fully the depth and despair of what it is to be human, regardless how much sweet, serene, light-hearted harmonious writing he produced.

CMT: There are no scholarly medical papers indexed in Medline that discuss any evidence that Mozart had Asperger’s Syndrome. And yet there is a considerable lore that exists suggesting that he did have this syndrome. And when I listen to Mozart it always reminds me of behaviors of someone I once knew, who has Asperger’s. The Emanuel Ax quote above is emblematic of this sense of urgency or compulsion in Asperger’s. There is a perseveration, a sort of excessive insistence, an automatism in people who are afflicted with this. It’s hard to deny that Mozart’s letters and the accounts of his behavior do have features consistent with Asperger’s. And his father was clearly protective of Wolfgang to a late age—to 1781 and beyond—as though the father thought Wolfgang would have difficulty attending to the practical necessities of daily living, difficulty staying alive. This would be typical for a parent of an Asperger’s child. Parents often first notice the symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome when their child starts preschool and begins to interact with other children. Features of Asperger’s syndrome include:

  • Unable to understand social cues and lack inborn social skills, such as being able to read others’ body language, start or maintain a conversation, and take turns talking.
  • Dislike for any changes in routines.
  • May appear to lack empathy.
  • Unable to recognize ordinary but subtle differences in speech tone, pitch, and accent that alter the meaning of others’ speech—may not understand a joke or may take a sarcastic comment literally.
  • Has a formal, readerly, stilted style of speaking. For example, the child may use the word “beckon” instead of “call,” or “returning here” instead of “coming home.”
  • Avoids eye contact.
  • Has unusual facial expressions or postures or tics.
  • Preoccupied with one or only few interests, which he or she may be very knowledgeable about.
  • Peculiarly interested in parts of a complex whole thing or in unusual activities, such as doing intricate jigsaw puzzles, designing houses, drawing highly detailed scenes, or astronomy.
  • Talks a lot, or compulsively, usually about a favorite subject. One-sided conversations are common. Internal thoughts are often expressed out loud.
  • Delayed motor development. Late in learning to use a fork or spoon, ride a bike, or catch a ball. Handwriting is often poor.
  • May have heightened sensitivity to loud noises, lights, or strong tastes or textures.

Most symptoms persist through the teen years. And while teens with Asperger’s can begin to learn those social skills they lack, communication often remains difficult. They continue to have difficulty reading others’ behavior. Asperger’s syndrome is a lifelong condition, although it tends to stabilize over time, and improvements are often seen. Adults usually achieve a progressively better understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses. They are able to learn social skills and how to read others’ social cues. And their own grasp of their situation as a mixed bag of endowments and disabilities enables most Asperger’s people to empathize with and understand the perplexity of the human condition—including loss and aging—as well as any other human can do. They just may not be able to express it as readily as others. Or the habitual patterns of expression that are their preference may prevent the expression of these other dimensions.

DSM: You know, Heaton in London has shown that children with autistic spectrum disorders like Asperger’s typically show impairments in processing ‘affective information’. But music, so rich in emotional and affective content as it is, is characteristically processed and apprehended readily by people with autism or Asperger’s. Heaton studied fourteen children with autism or Asperger syndrome and fourteen age and intelligence matched controls. They were tested for their ability to identify the affective meanings of melodies in the major and minor keys. The groups didn’t differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to happy and sad affective categories. So, in contrast to their performance troubles in other social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli. In fact, in many cases people with Asperger’s or autism may have superior ability to correctly ascertain affective and transactional meanings in music, compared to ‘normal’ people.

CMT: There is an account in Harnoncourt’s book, where he examines Mozart’s letters to his father and finds evidence that Mozart had a superior sense of drama—the ghost scene in Hamlet. The ghost’s recitative needs to be shorter than the text as Shakespeare wrote it, for the recitative to have the necessary frightening effect. So here is Mozart in 1781, at age 25, opining that Shakespeare wrote the play incorrectly, correcting the great Shakespeare.

T ell me, don’t you think that the speech of the subterranean voice is too long? Consider this carefully. Picture it to yourself and remember that the voice must be terrifying—must penetrate—that the audience must believe that it really exists. Well, how can this effect be produced if the speech is so long, for in this case will not the listeners become more and more convinced that it means nothing?”
  —  W.A.Mozart,
   in Letters of Mozart and His Family,
   E. Anderson, Macmillan & Co., 1938.

DSM: And there is James McConnel’s documentary 3 years ago on BBC. He said Mozart’s fascination with wordplay and making each line in his letters rhyme, his obsession with clocks, shoe sizes and gadgets and his documented foot-tapping and twitching all suggested Tourette’s syndrome, not Asperger’s. He said the strongest clues are found in the music itself, not in the correspondence. The mixture of chaos and control in the music. Tourette’s is a constant battle between the two, having a compulsion and trying to control it, and that translates into music.

Tourette’s Tic CMT: While McConnel suggested the syndrome might have directed the nature of Mozart’s works, he never said it was the source of Mozart’s genius. While it may have affected the way in which his genius manifested itself and made him go against the grain of society, Mozart would have been a brilliant composer without Tourette’s. This has also been the directon of some of Karhausen’s analysis.


Mozart Requiem, detail of manuscript, tics


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