POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Schumann chapter:

Celestial angels dictated to Robert Schumann an entire work composed by the spirit of Franz Schubert—or so he thought in the week when he experienced his sudden turn to madness. On Friday night, 10 February 1854, he suffered an acute attack of tinnitus, with strong and painful auditory disturbances that continued for a week, until they developed into musical tones and “wondrous” angelic voices consisting of a set of five variations on the angelic theme. Schubert as an angelic being had been anticipated in Schumann’s diary in 1828. He had sobbed throughout the night when he heard of Schubert’s death: “And you, heavenly Schubert, all too soon called home. . . .You are the over-arching celestial spirit that enshrouds its flowers of spring.”

Following this episode, Schumann was taken to an insane asylum near Bonn where his doctor, Franz Richarz, kept a journal with entries about his famous patient, recording his meals, medications, rages, and fantasies. Some of the time Schumann was agitated and delusional, as when Richarz noted: “Was restless, violent, loud; hit the orderly, saying that ‘everything was poisoned’; also during the night constantly excited, roaring, raging.” At other times he was calm and rational, playing the piano, composing, writing letters, and making entries in his diary. One of Richarz’s entries is of particular interest: “12 September 1855. During rounds busy with calculating his financial circumstances and very calm. Recently has been writing down all kinds of brief jottings and reflections of melancholy content, e.g., ‘In 1831 I was syphilitic and treated with arsenic.’”

In the years after Schumann’s death, the Richarz diary was kept secret, passing from the godson of Richarz’s aunt to that godson’s nephew, Aribert Reimann, who inherited it in 1973 and kept it at home as his uncle had requested in the interest of doctor-patient confidentiality. After sleepless nights of indecision, he finally handed it over to the Archive of the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, in 1991. Franz Hermann Franken, a medical historian and pathographer, commented on the report, pleased to put to rest rumors that had been printed “even in renowned journals” that Clara Schumann had shoved her husband into the asylum to carry on a love affair with Johannes Brahms, concluding that the legend of Robert and Clara as a ”nightmare couple” is banal “and ignores the fact that Robert Schumann’s fate is the greatest human tragedy of German Romanticism.” Comments in Richarz’s records, such as “physically attacked the doctor,” “spilled wine given to him at dinner into the stove because he thought it was urine,” and “stuck the orderlies” justified Clara’s decision to turn her husband over to the care of Richarz’s clinic.

Franken asks: “Does Richarz’s progress report now clarify the diagnosis of Schumann’s illness? The question is to be answered in the affirmative. Richarz described the characteristic development of a cerebral degeneration, in which the indications are convincing that it had to do with a progressive paralysis caused by syphilis.” He lists the various indications of progressive paralysis in Richarz’s report, noting speech that became difficult and less understandable, convulsions, deterioration of his personality, and, most telling, differing dilation of his pupils. The autopsy report as well confirmed syphilis: “the yellowish, gelatinous mass that he described at the base of the brain therefore corresponded, as we had already suspected in 1981, most likely to a syphilitic gumma.” Bone tumors found at the base of the skull are also suspicion-arousers, as is the condition of the heart, which Ostward described as “big, flaccid, thick-walled, in all chambers symmetrically too large,” commenting: “If Schumann had had syphilis affecting the valves or the aorta that might have caused cardiac enlargement.” Richarz diagnosed paralysis; Franken observed that what is self-evident today—the causal relationship between progressive paralysis preceded by decades of syphilitic infection—was not known to Dr. Richarz.