Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana is a survey of Mozart's career and music, showing his incomparable but troubled genius and suggests that the composer may have suffered from Tourette Syndrom and other psychiatric disorders.
From the Publisher
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 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 Dr. Simkin finds letters and journalistic entries to, from, and about Mozart that present an unusual picture of the young genius. We see Mozart fidgeting, 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 eccentricities would make Tom Hulce’s giddy portrayal in the film Amadeus seem reserved by comparison.
To Dr. Simkin, an endocrinologist emeritus at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, such accounts are clues to Mozart’s possible Tourette Syndrome, a genetic neurologic disorder, unknown during Mozart’s lifetime, two hundred years ago. Dr. Simkin further reviews the medical history of Mozart and his family, suggesting an additional genetic triad of perfect pitch, hyperactivity, and migraine headaches. He also compares Mozart’s letters and friends’ accounts of Mozart’s behavior with those of present day living subjects to bolster his contention of Mozart’s possible 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.
Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana
Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana,Benjamin Simkin,Fithian Press,1564743497,1756-1791,Biography / Autobiography,Criticism and interpretation,General,Genres & Styles - Classical,Health,History & Criticism - General,Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,,Music,Psychology,Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana
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