Me and Robert Schumann: All We're Left With Is A Psychiatric Opinion of Dubious Value

The ninteteenth-century German composer Robert Schumann died in a mental asylum. An anecdote I read in a biography of Robert Schumann's intrigued me. In the final weeks of his illness, Schumann was permitted access to a piano. He improvised something for the asylum director, who recorded in Schumann's clinical chart that the music Schumann created was incomprehensible noise. The biographer notes, with some irony, that that response was precisely what contemporary music critics had always said about Schumann's piano compositions.

So there is no real way of knowing whether Schumann's final improvisations in the asylum (which were not written down for modern-day critique) were the bizarre creations of a severely disturbed individual or whether those improvisations, in fact, displayed the compositional virtuosity of Schumann's genius. All we have at this point in time is the dated report of a psychiatric consultant from the University of Vienna, who, in fact, had no expertise in the area he was assessing.  Sound familiar?