Jonathan Biss.
In Wednesday’s (10/30) New York Times, Jonathan Biss writes, “Earlier this month, I played Robert Schumann’s piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I came offstage feeling altered, as I so often do after performing Schumann’s music … Moments later, in the green room, I heard the questions I’ve grown accustomed to but still steel myself against: Had Schumann already gone mad when he wrote this work? Can I hear the madness in the music? Schumann did indeed suffer from severe mental illness … And yet these questions always bother me. They reduce this beautiful, complicated, staggeringly gifted person to a pathology. More dangerously, they indicate a persistent and pernicious stereotype: the tortured artist…. This is a myth, one that has been useful for the promotion of artists—crazy, like sex, sells—but deeply damaging to the artists themselves…. Paradoxically, this presumption of emotional instability has made it not easier but more difficult for artists to be forthright about our mental health…. The psychic cost of this stigma around discussing mental health is bad enough. No less lamentable is the artistic cost…. Today, the winds may be changing. As athletes, politicians and actors have gone public with their mental health struggles, so too have musicians…. The shame is being lifted.”
