The poisoned chalice

One of the most brilliant and startlingly original composers who ever lived was Ludwig van Beethoven.

He was capable of deep, stirring pathos, like the second movement of the Piano Sonata #8 ("Pathetique"), which I swear could make a stone cry.

Then there's the wild, joyous gallop of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony:

And if you haven't seen it, a must-watch is this Spanish flash mob performing the "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony.  When the voices come in, it makes me sob every damn time.

*brief pause to stop blubbering*

What blows me away about the Ninth Symphony -- beyond its staggering beauty -- is that when Beethoven wrote it, he was almost completely deaf.  The story goes that at the first performance, he conducted the orchestra -- and when it was over, the first violinist rose to gently turn around the great composer to see that the entire audience was on their feet, applauding wildly, many of them in tears.

Beethoven died in 1827 at the age of only 56 years, after decades of chronic ill health.  It's long been a question amongst music historians what ailment claimed his hearing, and finally his life; we know from his journals that he was plagued with stomach problems as well.  But was his hearing loss connected to his other health issues?

Apparently the answer is yes.  According to a study I was alerted to by my wonderful writer friend K. D. McCrite, a study that came out last week in the journal Clinical Chemistry indicates the likely cause of Beethoven's illness, deafness, and early death was lead poisoning.

The researchers analyzed two authenticated locks of Beethoven's hair that had been preserved in a museum, and found something astonishing -- the two samples contained 258 and 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair.

For reference, the average person has about four micrograms of lead per gram of hair.

While not absolutely conclusive -- the researchers are showing caution about making assumptions regarding possible sources of contamination -- this seems like pretty strong evidence.  Lead poisoning is known to cause stomach and intestinal problems and also neurological damage, so it could account both for his digestive issues and his hearing loss (as well as his early death).  As far as where the lead could have come from, the researchers speculate it might have been from his known fondness for wine.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, lead acetate was added as a sweetener and de-clouding agent to cheap wine; corks were often soaked in solutions of lead salts before being used to stopper bottles.  Additionally, pewter wine vessels were common in Germany during the nineteenth century -- and pewter contains lead.

Whatever the source of the lead, it seems like the great composer's illness, deafness, and untimely demise might finally have an explanation.  Sad that such a genius suffered so greatly, but you have to wonder how much his pain and grief inspired the heart-wrenching beauty of his music.  No one would wish that suffering on anyone, but if it had to happen, at least Beethoven was able to distill it into something that still strikes our souls to this day.

"This man created some of the most beautiful music humanity was able to produce," said Nader Rifai, of Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the study.  "It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created."

But how fortunate for us all that we still can do so, almost two hundred years after his death.

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Misery loves creativity

I have bad news for those of you who enjoy being creative: a new study has suggested that a key ingredient in crafting timeless masterpieces is unhappiness.

As a fiction writer, I've been fascinated for years with the question of where creativity comes from.  While some of the ideas that have inspired my writing come from readily identifiable sources, a lot of my stories had their genesis in the mysterious "it just popped into my head" phenomenon.  I've talked to a lot of writers about this, and many of them have had the experience of feeling as if their inspiration came, literally, from outside of their own minds.

And like many writers (and artists and musicians) I have had serious dry spells, when the inspiration simply didn't want to come.  I keep writing through those -- I've found that the best way to push through writer's block is to throw some discipline at it -- but I won't say that what I produce during those times has much of the spark I look for when I critique my own work.  The best writing comes during times when the ideas leap into my mind unannounced, from heaven-only-knows-where.

This new study indicates that what I may be missing in my life is a good dose of plain, old-fashioned misery.

Entitled "How Are You, My Dearest Mozart?  Well-being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers Based on their Letters," the paper published this week in the Review of Economics and Statistics by economist and statistician Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark analyzes the letters and diaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt, and attempts to correlate the use of words indicating level of well-being with their productivity.

Not only their productivity in quantity, but in quality.  He looked at the timing of composition of works that "made a significant contribution to the classical canon," not just how many compositions they'd been able to churn out per month.  And the highest productivity, both in quality and quantity, came during the times these composers were most likely to use words like "sadness," "hurt," "grief," and "nervous."

"An increase in negative emotions by about 36.7 percent inspires one additional important composition the following year," Borowiecki writes.  "Since depression is strongly related to sadness, and is sometimes even defined as a state of chronic sadness, this result comes very close to previous claims made by psychologists that depression leads to increased creativity."

Factors that tended to decrease creative output were being in a happy marriage and finding a permanent position with its attendant job security.

Don't tell him to cheer up -- maybe he's working on a masterpiece.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I don't know about you, but I find this result kind of... depressing.  Is the reason I've had the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly recently every time I sit down to get some writing done on my current work-in-progress simply because I'm enjoying the summer too much?  Should I tell my wife that I'm sick of her being nice to me and bringing me glasses of wine and giving me shoulder rubs, that it'd be better for my muse if she gave me the silent treatment?  Maybe even the companionship of my dog is dampening my creativity.  Maybe I should get a pet that is perfectly content viewing me with disdain, or even ignoring my existence completely.

Like a cat, or something.

As interesting as this study is, I'm not sure that's the approach, frankly.  All of us creative types see ebbs and flows of our output, and the fact that the last few weeks have been pretty serious low tide shouldn't concern me.  Nor, I think, should it make me seek out ways to be more miserable.  It might be that the dark side of human existence can generate beautiful works of art, writing, or music -- listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata for a wonderful example of heart-wringing pathos -- but without joy as an inspiration, we'd never have had the "Bergamasca" from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, my vote for one of the most purely exuberant moments in all of classical music.

So it's a mixed bag, as you might expect.  The most creative minds weave the entirety of human experience into their works, and draw on all aspects of emotion to color what they create.  We may be no closer to understanding where creativity itself comes from, but if we can take our pain and sometimes distill it into something beautiful, at least it gives us something to carry us forward when we're at our lowest points.