I always liked the story of when Wagner met Schumann. Wagner said "Schumann was very quiet. Didn't say much." Schumann said "Wagner talked so much, I couldn't get a word in edgeways."
There's a journal entry of Queen Victoria who described Wagner as 'very quiet' when she met him. But it's well known that he was very much interested in his own ideas and in talking about them at great length, and it's easy to imagine a more introverted person like Schumann being completely overwhelmed in a discussion with him.
@@bloodgrss yeah. Listening to Schumann right now actually, as various people on here we’re going on about his sketches for the pedal piano. Goodness, it’s not as boring at all as the title suggests. Also noticed when I was at a recital earlier where there were themes and variations by Faure and Tchaikovsky and both were so obviously Schumann inspired. I’m not quite sure why Wagner had such an animus about Schumann, but I’m increasingly inclined to think that he sensed a greater talent (and of course I listen to Wagner).
No Berlioz? The guy who wrote a symphony about an opium-inducted nightmare in which he gets executed at the scaffold and ends up at a witches' Sabbath???? Who was so nuts that he fell in love with the Opehlia he saw on stage and then married her???
Mostly not the crowd I expected (no Satie?), but thank goodness you didn't leave out Scriabin. I just saw the San Francisco Symphony do Prometheus, Poem of Fire on Friday night. Not only did they present it with highly elaborate color/light effects, they had FRAGRANCE effects for extra synesthesia. Seeing smoke rings shoot out of the perfume cannons was a trip in itself. Definitely the most bizarre symphony performance I've ever experienced. And as long as they were doing colored lights anyway, the other work on the program was Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
It’s a good list, but I would definitely have put Don Carlo Gesualdo up there at the head of the class. I mean… how many of the others can claim actual murder and mutilation as musical inspiration?
Satie is perhaps too obvious because he was famously eccentric, but it did impact his work: his lifelong obsession with the number 3, his avoidance or skewering of traditional forms, the idea of repetition taken to absurd degrees, and of course "Furniture Music", designed to not be listened to. And that's just the technical side of his nuttiness. There's a theory Satie may have had Asperger's.
@@dennischiapello7243Satie had odd religious fixations in the early 1890s, but his involvement in Peladan's Rose + Croix movement was opportunistic. It brought him his first public attention outside the Montmartre cabarets where he toiled as a second-string pianist. But Peladan was a total Wagner fanboy and Satie had no intention of writing that kind of music, so he started his own parody religious sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. His only sacred composition, the "Mass for the Poor", was composed for that "church", of which he was the only member.
I was about to fall sleep and happened to pick this video. I violently came back to my awaken being mode, it's so good!! hilariously funny and insightful into one side of composers that's always bypassed. Excellent 😄😁👍
I expected to find Percy Grainger here on top of the list... A composer which translated all italian musical terms in 'blue-eyed' English, invented the 'elastic scoring' allowing the same work to be performed by a chamber ensemble or a giant orchestra of hundreds of players, that gave concerts in the 5 continents, sometimes jogging from one concertplace to the next, that married his 2nd wife during the intermission of a concert of his own works at the Hollywood Bowl before a public of ten thousand people, that tried to build automatom able to produce 'free music', that build his own museum in his native Australia and expressed the wish of having his skeleton exposed there... and dozen of other eccentricities to numerous to listen here... Poor Grainger who complained not to be recognize as a serious composer during his lifetime, he is not even recognize as an insane one!
Percy Grainger once wrote a letter containing a sexual fantasy about his own underage daughter, though there's no evidence that he actually acted on it.
Grainger’s wife (Ella of Hollywood Bowl fame) had a daughter out of wedlock before they met; Elsie was 19 when they married and technically no relation to him in any way. He was peculiar in many way, the most significant being his racist views. Oh yeah, and sado-masochistic to boot. Definitely a nut job, but despite a vast output and heroic efforts on the part of Chandos, Grainger is not significant enough to be on anyone’s list of second-rate classical composers. I only know of him because two old folk friends of my wife released a disc of his English folk song collections.
I don't know about 'Nuts' but one of my favourite composers Charles Koechlin was certainly 'A bit eccentric' to say the least with his long flowing white hair and beard topped off with a cape, writing endless letters of admiration to a young Hollywood actress (Lilian Harvey, who everyone has all but forgotten) which actually rather frightened her to finish up. He even wrote a symphony about Hollywood stars 'The Seven Stars Symphony' Anyway Dave, since you rather like name-dropping (Ahem) Many years ago, his son and one of his daughters came to my house for tea! Now that was fun.
Malcolm Arnold should be on the list....I find his introduction of jolly, jaunty tunes in his (largely tense, often dark) symphonies terribly disturbing - and am sure was a reflection of his slightly unhinged personality. His last symphony is a modern Pathétique...
@@tortuedelanuit2299 He certainly is. Within movements he juxtaposes the most sweetly soulful melodies with raucous howls of pain. His 2nd String Quartet's final movement follows a 3rd movement steeped in the depths of depression. The 4th movement is one of heavenly serene beauty but still interrupted in the middle by an outbreak of vigour and violence.
Hugely entertaining and funny. Schumann I know went insane and Scriabin (whose music I completely adore) was definitely crazy. Very compelling arguments for the others!
To those mentioning Shostakovich all I can say is the cliché: it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Lol Anyhow, you gotta love how ahead of his time Scriabin was. He could have been the dude at the Pink Floyd laser show every weekend during the 70s.
Beethoven? There is something about a guy who moves more than once a year that seems a little...unstable? And to me his most magnificent music--the late quartets and sonatas--is pretty darn dark.
Add to that the unhinged way he treated his nephew, taking him away from the boy's mother and obsessively controlling him,, finally driving his nephew to a suicide attempt. Of course, Beethoven was an abused child, himself, by his father. But biographers have said that each time Beethoven teetered over the brink into insanity or suicide, he would end up re-inventing himself musically and taking his music to a new level. A very strange psychology!
I have really enjoyed these two videos, I could tell you were basically having fun but there were also great insights into how composers' psychology affects their music. The really insane composers are interesting because, when they want, they often can project sanity, wholeness and peace very effectively. Mozart is the best example, I think a large proportion of his works project elegance and refinement along those lines. It seems like on this issue, composers' sanity has to be judged based on their most extreme examples, and your Don Giovanni example seems to prove your point well. Interestingly, I think the healthy composers actually have difficulty sounding crazy. Stravinsky, for example, who made your healthy list, seems crazy in the Right of Spring, but actually the piece still has that sense of detachment that renders it ultimately a very sane work. I found it tough to think of examples from composers on your other list where the composer sounded genuinely off the rails.
I would have put Richard Strauss on my "sane" list because of his businesslike approach to his art. When Hitler took power in 1933 Strauss said, "I composed under the Kaiser and under Ebert. I'll compose under this one as well." You can fault him for his political naïveté but that's not necessarily a sign of insanity. In fact, one thing that's fascinating about Strauss was the clash between the subjects he picked for his tone poems and opera and the thoroughly conventional middle-class German burgher's life he led. I also think you were a bit unfair to Wagner; not that he wasn't crazy (he was), but the love = death bit was quite common in the Romantic era. It's why Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" was more popular in the 19th century than it had been in Shakespeare's time. And I'm a bit surprised Berlioz didn't make your list; he anticipated Wagner in his single-minded determination to get his music played the way HE wanted. Wagner recognized Berlioz as a kindred spirit when he wrote in 1841, “His great virtue is that he does not write for money … Berlioz is a sworn enemy of anything vulgar, beggarly or catchpennyish. … If you want to hear Berlioz’s music you will have to go where he is, for you will encounter him nowhere else … You will hear Berlioz’s compositions only at the concerts which he himself gives once or twice a year. These are his own exclusive territory, and here he has his works performed by an orchestra of his own making, before a public captured by him in the course of a ten-year campaign.” The first time I read that I thought, "Role model," because what Wagner praised Berlioz for doing was what Wagner did at Bayreuth a quarter-century later.
I would add that the specifications for a performance of the Grande Messe des Morts is mad, lunatic and whatever else can describe the virtually impossible and undesirable. Talk about a 'Cast of Thousands' before Hollywood owned the phrase.
Strauss actually attempted to resist the Nazis as best he could. He promoted the performances of banned composers such as Mendelssohn and Mahler, supported Jewish musicians, and tried to protect many Jewish members of his extended family, unfortunately with little success, from the Nazis. You might say that he was actually sane when the rest of Germany had gone insane.
Maybe a category 'Weird and Crazy'? I am thinking of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, whose piano work Sequentia Cyclica, available on UA-cam lasts over 8 hours. Maybe that is why he is a neglected composer?
There's the grisly detail from a Puccini biographer that when he was dying of throat cancer he was wearing this medical contraption which held seven radioactive needles in his neck, one for each of the girls he had tortured to death in his operas.
One of my favorite Strauss stories is when he was actually dying he couldn't help himself and had to say, "Its exactly like I composed it in Tod und Verklarung." To the very end he couldn't help but promote his music. He was a good businessman. Let's not forget Hugo Wolf who literally wound up in an insane asylum. But all of these composers were inflicted by a fine madness.
When it comes to fin-de-siecle Viennese decadence, I think Strauss was an outdone by Franz Schreker. As for Scriabin, he deserves a category of his own: a composer who was afraid of his own Sixth Sonata; who planned for his final work "Mysterium" to be performed in the Himalayas and expected it to bring on a world apocalypse,
Now than you mention F. Schreker. I only know his 'Romantic Suite' well enough, and I like it a lot. So, I don't know anything ab out his personal life.
I have a record of Scriabin's Mysterium completed by another composer, Nemtim and performed by Kondrashin and his Moscow orchestra. Exotic and mysterious but also long-winded and dull.
@@johannesbluemink4581I was thinking less of Schreker's personal life than of the subject matter of his operas (he wrote his own librettos). For example, in Der Ferne Klang, a drunken father gambles away his daughter, she runs off and is lured into a life of prostitution by an elderly bawd. In Die Gezeichneten, a hunchbacked nobleman creates a secret island grotto which is co-opted by a group of unscrupulous aristocrats who turn it into a kind of Renaissance playboy mansion where they seduce and ravish young girls. In Der Schatzgraber, the eponymous minstrel/treasure finder falls in love with a woman who turns out to have been serially murdering her lovers whom she has been recruiting to steal the Queen's jewels. In Irrelohe, the hero is under a family curse which has caused each of his ancestors to go mad and become rapists. I could go on, but you get the idea...(I think, in fairness to Schreker, that he was more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of contemporary Viennese society than in pure sensationalism, but the Nazis, as self-appointed guardians of public morality branded him as "the Magnus Hisrschfield of opera composers. There was no sexual-pathological aberration he would not have set to music."
Interesting list... but I can't believe you didn't talk about the composers that many people consider...The really Crazy guys of music! Frank Zappa, Edgar Varese ( you being a percussionist!) and even the really far out...Harry Partch! Please do another clip on these guys... PLEASE!
much as i love Godunov, it's Khovanshchina that's my favorite Mussorgsky opera. I mean, it ends (i think?) with a chorus of the Old Believers .... lighting themselves on fire in the forest, no? But of course, Scriabin is my favorite, as a pianist. Such fun
For part 2 I nominate Silvestre Revueltas, who reportedly was actually admitted to a mental institution. When I first heard his music, without knowing anything about the man, I thought to myself "This guy is crazy (but in a good way)...or maybe a genius".
@@DavesClassicalGuideI could very well image a third video, dealing with the aspeptic, stoic, eremitic, middle-of-the road, well-tempered, hedging-their-bet, let's-not-get-tricked-into-showing-emotions-of-any-kind type of composers. Guys that can't properly characterized as either sane or insane, for shear lack of human features. This would obviously include guys like Boulez and Xenakis. On the other hand: Do we really want to go there?
The most insane biopic of an insane composer: 'Lisztomania', Ken Russell's 1975 anti-masterpiece (but still a picture I enjoy immensely), imagining Liszt's story as if the nineteenth century and Seventies pop culture had mashed up in an alternate bizarro universe. And Roger Daltrey of Who fame plays Liszt!
It’s striking how many opera composers made the list. Of the most popular opera composers, the only one who didn’t make the cut is Verdi! Regarding Puccini, I’ve been told that each ‘little girl’ corresponds to an actual woman whom he had a fling with. And there was apparently a “gardener” who worked on the Puccini estate and whose picture is still in the house somewhere who looked exactly like him.
Though--somehow--Minnie in La Fanciulla del West escaped to a happily-ever-after ending. (Maybe the princess Turandot, too? though that didn't help Liu any.)
@@MrDale53 Is the ending of Fanciulla a happy ever after though? Minnie essentially agrees to be outcast from her hometown, all for the sake of a bandit!
I seriously think Scriabin wasn't mad at all, but a very shrewd marketeer who exploited the turn-of-the-century predilection for esoteric BS to his advantage. Note that he never really committed to anything besides good wine, good food and thrysts with Natalia de Schloezer.
I always say, that you don't get a special talent without paying with your personality. Because you can't have it all. Every great composer, painter, author, athlet etc, have something bad or crazy in their personality. But the problem is that people thinks that because these great "heroes" can create these fantastic things, they must be gods. But sorry, it's often the opposite. The more talented, the more complicated personality. Sorry for my swenglish ...
Carl Nielsen would certainly fit into the crazy and wonderful categories. Geminiani. C.P.E. Bach. Boccherini (no one writes 141 String Quintets without having a screw loose). Havergal Brian with his 112 minute long 'Gothic' Symphony, scored for 800 musicians and singers and including 6 timpani! Stockhausen with his 4 helicopters. Telemann with his 7000 works. Paganini. Beethoven (we're just all used to his craziness). Wagner (or maybe it's his audiences that are insane?). Charles-Valentin Alkan. Gesualdo (dangerous and insane). Eric Satie (think 'Vexations'). And on and on. . .
Alkan, Hans Rott, Hugo Wolf, Charles Ives, Peter Warlock, K.K.Sorabji, Rued Langgaard, Leif Segerstam (354 symphonies and counting) must appear in your next list of crazy composers.
Part two?: Beethoven, Schubert (first in a series of Beethoven fixations), Mendelssohn (arguable), Chopin, Brahms (Beethoven fixation), Berlioz, Donizetti, Satie (?), Shostakovich ... Point being that it was in the nature of romantics and post-romantics (then as now) to be at least a little nuts.
So Liszt was never listless? Sorry. I always liked Richard Strauss, by the way. Everyone knows the magnificent opening to 'Thus Spake Zarathustra,' of course, but I find the symphonic poems and works like Alpine and Don Juan to be quite witty and lively. I can't really hear the nuttiness, butt I'm not sure of my own mental soundness either. Now Wagner, both the person and the music I completely agree with. El Creepo.
@@johnmarchington3146 Scriabin sketched a 72-page Prelude to the work (which was to last a week and include dance and a light show as well as music). Alexander Nemtin adapted this into a 3-hour “Preparation for the Final Mystery” which Ashkenazy recorded.
Very funny in that Haydn was the very happy if overworked Classical genius, Mozart the strange Classical genius.....and Mozart gets top billing mostly,
I don't really think Paganini was insane or crazy. In fact, I believe he was a quite intelligent kind of business man, who took advantage of people believing he was creepy and devil influenced.
Did Don Giovanni...and always laughed about the last fugue at the end when all the action has ceased....telling us basically that Don Giovanni got what he deserved in the end....it is rather hilarious.....was Don Giovanni another Drammatico buffo?
That fugue is fab though. It’s interesting. Yes, Don Giovanni gets what he deserves - the opera is called “il dissoluto punito” after all. But the ambiguity about it is partly what makes it so great and hard to interpret. Mozart certainly liked sex after all, and it’s one reason he seems to me to be more “healthy “ than Dave allows. There’s a really interesting discussion of this in Nicholas Tills’ “Mozart and the enlightenment “ if it’s still in print. “The rake punished” is presumably what inspired the similar (and also marvellous) epilogue to Stravinsky’s “Rakes Progess”
A comedy, in the sense that order is threatened, roles are reversed, and then all comes back to normal. Leporello's transition into Don G's status and back (clothes, voice, and nearly one of his women) is prefigured in his first aria.
One more thing about Mozart that reflects his not quite normal mind would be his strange scatological obsessions, even writing pieces such as "Leck mich im Arsch" and "Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber:" Another composer who perhaps belongs on the list would be Carlo Gesualdo. His music became progressively more chromatic after he murdered his adulterous wife, possibly due to a mind unhinged by a guilty conscience.
I always liked the story of when Wagner met Schumann. Wagner said "Schumann was very quiet. Didn't say much." Schumann said "Wagner talked so much, I couldn't get a word in edgeways."
The fact is, both opinions were true...
I like Berlioz' description of the Prelude to "Tristan" even more - "a long, chromatic moan." He was right.
There's a journal entry of Queen Victoria who described Wagner as 'very quiet' when she met him. But it's well known that he was very much interested in his own ideas and in talking about them at great length, and it's easy to imagine a more introverted person like Schumann being completely overwhelmed in a discussion with him.
@@classicallpvault8251 Even Berlioz talked about Schumann's taciturnity. And many of even his friends talked about Wagner's verbose pontificating...
@@bloodgrss yeah. Listening to Schumann right now actually, as various people on here we’re going on about his sketches for the pedal piano. Goodness, it’s not as boring at all as the title suggests. Also noticed when I was at a recital earlier where there were themes and variations by Faure and Tchaikovsky and both were so obviously Schumann inspired. I’m not quite sure why Wagner had such an animus about Schumann, but I’m increasingly inclined to think that he sensed a greater talent (and of course I listen to Wagner).
No Berlioz? The guy who wrote a symphony about an opium-inducted nightmare in which he gets executed at the scaffold and ends up at a witches' Sabbath???? Who was so nuts that he fell in love with the Opehlia he saw on stage and then married her???
Fair enough, but to cover all „crazy and insane“ composers, the video would be several hours long😅
Toss him into the mix. You're right.
@@DavesClassicalGuide May need a part 2. I'm thinking maybe Sorabji and Satie? Alkan?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Thanks, Dave.
Berlioz composed four Symphonies.
Mostly not the crowd I expected (no Satie?), but thank goodness you didn't leave out Scriabin. I just saw the San Francisco Symphony do Prometheus, Poem of Fire on Friday night. Not only did they present it with highly elaborate color/light effects, they had FRAGRANCE effects for extra synesthesia. Seeing smoke rings shoot out of the perfume cannons was a trip in itself. Definitely the most bizarre symphony performance I've ever experienced. And as long as they were doing colored lights anyway, the other work on the program was Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
I don't know if you can include Bartok himself on the list but Bluebeard's Castle is one of the most chillingly insane things I'd ever heard.
Fabulous!!! Boy, did I enjoy this Video!!! 😂🎉😊Many many thanks!!!
It’s a good list, but I would definitely have put Don Carlo Gesualdo up there at the head of the class. I mean… how many of the others can claim actual murder and mutilation as musical inspiration?
Good point.
Yes, when I saw the title of this clip my first thought was “Gesualdo, right?”
I was under the impression that Gesualdo was left out intentionally, because he is such an obvious choice ...
Strauss was completely sane when he wasn't writing Salome. The ultimate bourgeois.
... when he wasn't writing Elektra ... !!!
Poor Bruckner gets no respect on his Birthday year. lol
One of my faves of all your Talks
Satie is perhaps too obvious because he was famously eccentric, but it did impact his work: his lifelong obsession with the number 3, his avoidance or skewering of traditional forms, the idea of repetition taken to absurd degrees, and of course "Furniture Music", designed to not be listened to. And that's just the technical side of his nuttiness. There's a theory Satie may have had Asperger's.
And the Rosicrucian thing.
@@dennischiapello7243Satie had odd religious fixations in the early 1890s, but his involvement in Peladan's Rose + Croix movement was opportunistic. It brought him his first public attention outside the Montmartre cabarets where he toiled as a second-string pianist. But Peladan was a total Wagner fanboy and Satie had no intention of writing that kind of music, so he started his own parody religious sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. His only sacred composition, the "Mass for the Poor", was composed for that "church", of which he was the only member.
I was about to fall sleep and happened to pick this video. I violently came back to my awaken being mode, it's so good!! hilariously funny and insightful into one side of composers that's always bypassed. Excellent 😄😁👍
Thank you!
I expected to find Percy Grainger here on top of the list... A composer which translated all italian musical terms in 'blue-eyed' English, invented the 'elastic scoring' allowing the same work to be performed by a chamber ensemble or a giant orchestra of hundreds of players, that gave concerts in the 5 continents, sometimes jogging from one concertplace to the next, that married his 2nd wife during the intermission of a concert of his own works at the Hollywood Bowl before a public of ten thousand people, that tried to build automatom able to produce 'free music', that build his own museum in his native Australia and expressed the wish of having his skeleton exposed there... and dozen of other eccentricities to numerous to listen here... Poor Grainger who complained not to be recognize as a serious composer during his lifetime, he is not even recognize as an insane one!
Percy Grainger once wrote a letter containing a sexual fantasy about his own underage daughter, though there's no evidence that he actually acted on it.
Grainger was married twice but had no children...
+ he was a Nordicist like Wagner, and held strongly biased views of non-European people.
I’m not aware of a first wife, only of his marriage (yes, at Hollywood Bowl!) to Ella…do tell.
Grainger’s wife (Ella of Hollywood Bowl fame) had a daughter out of wedlock before they met; Elsie was 19 when they married and technically no relation to him in any way. He was peculiar in many way, the most significant being his racist views. Oh yeah, and sado-masochistic to boot. Definitely a nut job, but despite a vast output and heroic efforts on the part of Chandos, Grainger is not significant enough to be on anyone’s list of second-rate classical composers. I only know of him because two old folk friends of my wife released a disc of his English folk song collections.
"Schumann had the advantage of actually going insane." Great stuff
I produced a very ugly laugh at this
I don't know about 'Nuts' but one of my favourite composers Charles Koechlin was certainly 'A bit eccentric' to say the least with his long flowing white hair and beard topped off with a cape, writing endless letters of admiration to a young Hollywood actress (Lilian Harvey, who everyone has all but forgotten) which actually rather frightened her to finish up. He even wrote a symphony about Hollywood stars 'The Seven Stars Symphony' Anyway Dave, since you rather like name-dropping (Ahem) Many years ago, his son and one of his daughters came to my house for tea! Now that was fun.
I'll bet.
Malcolm Arnold should be on the list....I find his introduction of jolly, jaunty tunes in his (largely tense, often dark) symphonies terribly disturbing - and am sure was a reflection of his slightly unhinged personality. His last symphony is a modern Pathétique...
After his 5th symphony they seem to get darker and more erratic.
Arnold is the ultimate manic depressive composer.
@@tortuedelanuit2299 He certainly is. Within movements he juxtaposes the most sweetly soulful melodies with raucous howls of pain. His 2nd String Quartet's final movement follows a 3rd movement steeped in the depths of depression. The 4th movement is one of heavenly serene beauty but still interrupted in the middle by an outbreak of vigour and violence.
Hilarious.... one of the best videos in this series.
Hugely entertaining and funny. Schumann I know went insane and Scriabin (whose music I completely adore) was definitely crazy. Very compelling arguments for the others!
Indeed. I love Scriabin's Piano Music, not his Poems or Symphonies.
To those mentioning Shostakovich all I can say is the cliché: it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Lol Anyhow, you gotta love how ahead of his time Scriabin was. He could have been the dude at the Pink Floyd laser show every weekend during the 70s.
Beethoven? There is something about a guy who moves more than once a year that seems a little...unstable? And to me his most magnificent music--the late quartets and sonatas--is pretty darn dark.
And ALMOST insane.
Add to that the unhinged way he treated his nephew, taking him away from the boy's mother and obsessively controlling him,, finally driving his nephew to a suicide attempt. Of course, Beethoven was an abused child, himself, by his father. But biographers have said that each time Beethoven teetered over the brink into insanity or suicide, he would end up re-inventing himself musically and taking his music to a new level. A very strange psychology!
Late piano sonatas not dark
@@MrDale53 One might call it genius?
The autopsy caught liver cirrhosis. Not sure if his was worse than anyone else's in those days.
I have really enjoyed these two videos, I could tell you were basically having fun but there were also great insights into how composers' psychology affects their music. The really insane composers are interesting because, when they want, they often can project sanity, wholeness and peace very effectively. Mozart is the best example, I think a large proportion of his works project elegance and refinement along those lines. It seems like on this issue, composers' sanity has to be judged based on their most extreme examples, and your Don Giovanni example seems to prove your point well.
Interestingly, I think the healthy composers actually have difficulty sounding crazy. Stravinsky, for example, who made your healthy list, seems crazy in the Right of Spring, but actually the piece still has that sense of detachment that renders it ultimately a very sane work. I found it tough to think of examples from composers on your other list where the composer sounded genuinely off the rails.
Very enjoyable video. Thank you.
If accidental insanity counts, I would add the sad saga of Edward MacDowell to the list.
I would have put Richard Strauss on my "sane" list because of his businesslike approach to his art. When Hitler took power in 1933 Strauss said, "I composed under the Kaiser and under Ebert. I'll compose under this one as well." You can fault him for his political naïveté but that's not necessarily a sign of insanity. In fact, one thing that's fascinating about Strauss was the clash between the subjects he picked for his tone poems and opera and the thoroughly conventional middle-class German burgher's life he led. I also think you were a bit unfair to Wagner; not that he wasn't crazy (he was), but the love = death bit was quite common in the Romantic era. It's why Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" was more popular in the 19th century than it had been in Shakespeare's time. And I'm a bit surprised Berlioz didn't make your list; he anticipated Wagner in his single-minded determination to get his music played the way HE wanted. Wagner recognized Berlioz as a kindred spirit when he wrote in 1841, “His great virtue is that he does not write for money … Berlioz is a sworn enemy of anything vulgar, beggarly or catchpennyish. … If you want to hear Berlioz’s music you will have to go where he is, for you will encounter him nowhere else … You will hear Berlioz’s compositions only at the concerts which he himself gives once or twice a year. These are his own exclusive territory, and here he has his works performed by an orchestra of his own making, before a public captured by him in the course of a ten-year campaign.” The first time I read that I thought, "Role model," because what Wagner praised Berlioz for doing was what Wagner did at Bayreuth a quarter-century later.
🙄
I would add that the specifications for a performance of the Grande Messe des Morts is mad, lunatic and whatever else can describe the virtually impossible and undesirable. Talk about a 'Cast of Thousands' before Hollywood owned the phrase.
I should put Strauss in the list of most egocentricc and self confident composers
Strauss actually attempted to resist the Nazis as best he could. He promoted the performances of banned composers such as Mendelssohn and Mahler, supported Jewish musicians, and tried to protect many Jewish members of his extended family, unfortunately with little success, from the Nazis. You might say that he was actually sane when the rest of Germany had gone insane.
Maybe a category 'Weird and Crazy'? I am thinking of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, whose piano work Sequentia Cyclica, available on UA-cam lasts over 8 hours. Maybe that is why he is a neglected composer?
There's the grisly detail from a Puccini biographer that when he was dying of throat cancer he was wearing this medical contraption which held seven radioactive needles in his neck, one for each of the girls he had tortured to death in his operas.
One of my favorite Strauss stories is when he was actually dying he couldn't help himself and had to say, "Its exactly like I composed it in Tod und Verklarung." To the very end he couldn't help but promote his music. He was a good businessman.
Let's not forget Hugo Wolf who literally wound up in an insane asylum.
But all of these composers were inflicted by a fine madness.
When it comes to fin-de-siecle Viennese decadence, I think Strauss was an outdone by Franz Schreker. As for Scriabin, he deserves a category of his own: a composer who was afraid of his own Sixth Sonata; who planned for his final work "Mysterium" to be performed in the Himalayas and expected it to bring on a world apocalypse,
Now than you mention F. Schreker. I only know his 'Romantic Suite' well enough, and I like it a lot. So, I don't know anything ab out his personal life.
I have a record of Scriabin's Mysterium completed by another composer, Nemtim and performed by Kondrashin and his Moscow orchestra. Exotic and mysterious but also long-winded and dull.
@@johannesbluemink4581I was thinking less of Schreker's personal life than of the subject matter of his operas (he wrote his own librettos). For example, in Der Ferne Klang, a drunken father gambles away his daughter, she runs off and is lured into a life of prostitution by an elderly bawd. In Die Gezeichneten, a hunchbacked nobleman creates a secret island grotto which is co-opted by a group of unscrupulous aristocrats who turn it into a kind of Renaissance playboy mansion where they seduce and ravish young girls. In Der Schatzgraber, the eponymous minstrel/treasure finder falls in love with a woman who turns out to have been serially murdering her lovers whom she has been recruiting to steal the Queen's jewels. In Irrelohe, the hero is under a family curse which has caused each of his ancestors to go mad and become rapists. I could go on, but you get the idea...(I think, in fairness to Schreker, that he was more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of contemporary Viennese society than in pure sensationalism, but the Nazis, as self-appointed guardians of public morality branded him as "the Magnus Hisrschfield of opera composers. There was no sexual-pathological aberration he would not have set to music."
Out of that lot Scriabin would be the looney I would want to have a conversation with.
Interesting list... but I can't believe you didn't talk about the composers that many people consider...The really Crazy guys of music! Frank Zappa, Edgar Varese ( you being a percussionist!) and even the really far out...Harry Partch! Please do another clip on these guys... PLEASE!
I love how measured you are in this talk.
much as i love Godunov, it's Khovanshchina that's my favorite Mussorgsky opera. I mean, it ends (i think?) with a chorus of the Old Believers .... lighting themselves on fire in the forest, no? But of course, Scriabin is my favorite, as a pianist. Such fun
great Dave ! great Liszt he must of been phenomenal on the piano. I have read he is considered the greatest ever?
I like your Manon Lescaut take 😂
For part 2 I nominate Silvestre Revueltas, who reportedly was actually admitted to a mental institution. When I first heard his music, without knowing anything about the man, I thought to myself "This guy is crazy (but in a good way)...or maybe a genius".
The next video should be about composers who perfectly balance insanity and cool-headedness. :)
Yes, led by Mozart and Puccini and Mahler and Britten
Already done.
@@DavesClassicalGuideI could very well image a third video, dealing with the aspeptic, stoic, eremitic, middle-of-the road, well-tempered, hedging-their-bet, let's-not-get-tricked-into-showing-emotions-of-any-kind type of composers. Guys that can't properly characterized as either sane or insane, for shear lack of human features. This would obviously include guys like Boulez and Xenakis. On the other hand: Do we really want to go there?
The most insane biopic of an insane composer: 'Lisztomania', Ken Russell's 1975 anti-masterpiece (but still a picture I enjoy immensely), imagining Liszt's story as if the nineteenth century and Seventies pop culture had mashed up in an alternate bizarro universe. And Roger Daltrey of Who fame plays Liszt!
Genius is a fine line from madness
I think you've struck a blow for Tom Hulse's portrayal of Mozart (though maybe not the laugh).
It’s striking how many opera composers made the list. Of the most popular opera composers, the only one who didn’t make the cut is Verdi! Regarding Puccini, I’ve been told that each ‘little girl’ corresponds to an actual woman whom he had a fling with. And there was apparently a “gardener” who worked on the Puccini estate and whose picture is still in the house somewhere who looked exactly like him.
Though--somehow--Minnie in La Fanciulla del West escaped to a happily-ever-after ending. (Maybe the princess Turandot, too? though that didn't help Liu any.)
@@MrDale53 Is the ending of Fanciulla a happy ever after though? Minnie essentially agrees to be outcast from her hometown, all for the sake of a bandit!
I seriously think Scriabin wasn't mad at all, but a very shrewd marketeer who exploited the turn-of-the-century predilection for esoteric BS to his advantage. Note that he never really committed to anything besides good wine, good food and thrysts with Natalia de Schloezer.
Would love to see this format but with artists instead
I always say, that you don't get a special talent without paying with your personality. Because you can't have it all. Every great composer, painter, author, athlet etc, have something bad or crazy in their personality.
But the problem is that people thinks that because these great "heroes" can create these fantastic things, they must be gods. But sorry, it's often the opposite. The more talented, the more complicated personality.
Sorry for my swenglish ...
Carl Nielsen would certainly fit into the crazy and wonderful categories. Geminiani. C.P.E. Bach. Boccherini (no one writes 141 String Quintets without having a screw loose). Havergal Brian with his 112 minute long 'Gothic' Symphony, scored for 800 musicians and singers and including 6 timpani! Stockhausen with his 4 helicopters. Telemann with his 7000 works. Paganini. Beethoven (we're just all used to his craziness). Wagner (or maybe it's his audiences that are insane?). Charles-Valentin Alkan. Gesualdo (dangerous and insane). Eric Satie (think 'Vexations'). And on and on. . .
Alkan, Hans Rott, Hugo Wolf, Charles Ives, Peter Warlock, K.K.Sorabji, Rued Langgaard, Leif Segerstam (354 symphonies and counting) must appear in your next list of crazy composers.
I was thinking of well-known composers, for the most part.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Nevertheless, Hans Rott would definitely be worth considering. How come Mahler himself is not on your list?
Rott is never worth considering, for anything.
One only needs to read Mozart’s letters to see how nutty he was
No he was smutty rather than nutty. So was his mum
Maybe, there can be a special category: the bipolar-autistic-mercurial composers: Shostakovich, Szymanowsky, C.P..E, Bach, Zelenka, Schnittke...
I thought the murderous Gesualdo whould be a shoe-in along with the S&M fanatic Percy Grainger.
I'm surprised that Schoenberg is not here. 😊
Part two?: Beethoven, Schubert (first in a series of Beethoven fixations), Mendelssohn (arguable), Chopin, Brahms (Beethoven fixation), Berlioz, Donizetti, Satie (?), Shostakovich ... Point being that it was in the nature of romantics and post-romantics (then as now) to be at least a little nuts.
Dave, I admire how well and clearly you were able to talk while your tongue was so firmly planted in your cheek. 🫡
I was expecting Erik Satie to be #1 on your list,
So many choices!
Any chance someone this year records a “new” reference recording of a Bruckner symphony?
There's always a chance.
Add Stockhausen. Insane, uber vain and OTT in every way. Completely barking mad.
Yes, but also musically kind of irrelevant.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Can't disagree there!
Okay. Maybe Romanticism was insane. Not only composers but poets.
Thank you for your words on Tchaikovsky! - "Der Rosenkavalier" is probably as close to a reprise of Mozart as is humanly possible.
I nominate Bernard Herrmann
More moody than crazy
More of an excentic. He kicked a few established behinds and made enemies as easy as 1-2-3. Still my favorite Composer!
So Liszt was never listless? Sorry. I always liked Richard Strauss, by the way. Everyone knows the magnificent opening to 'Thus Spake Zarathustra,' of course, but I find the symphonic poems and works like Alpine and Don Juan to be quite witty and lively. I can't really hear the nuttiness, butt I'm not sure of my own mental soundness either. Now Wagner, both the person and the music I completely agree with. El Creepo.
Interesting that they all are mainstream composers. What about B A Zimmermann?
I met a German musicologist who assured me that Zimmermann was perfectly described by the phrase “zum Unglück geboren”
Or John Cage or Stockhausen I suppose…
I thought Beethoven would be in the list. He seem mad at everyone all the time.
Wozzeck and Lulu make Salome seem mainstream!
Now, how about a list of stable nice-guy composers…
He already did it...
@@bloodgrss Dave does so many of these that it is hard to catch them all! But the embarrassment of riches here is second to none.
Which Scribin Symphony was it that was supposed to culminate in the end of the World? Now there is a finale!
None of them.
That would be his unfinished “Mysterium”.
Am I correct in saying that Ashkenazy created a performing edition of the work?
@@johnmarchington3146 Scriabin sketched a 72-page Prelude to the work (which was to last a week and include dance and a light show as well as music). Alexander Nemtin adapted this into a 3-hour “Preparation for the Final Mystery” which Ashkenazy recorded.
@@TherealzartharnThanks for that information. I did read about it (perhaps years ago) but all I remember is that Ashkenazy was involved in some way.
Very funny in that Haydn was the very happy if overworked Classical genius, Mozart the strange Classical genius.....and Mozart gets top billing mostly,
Not sure Haydn was always that happy :(
@@murraylow4523One thing he had in common with Strauss a century later was a real termagent for a wife.
@@bbailey7818 Yes that’s what I was thinking of. Whatever problems Mozart had, he did really have a successful marriage
What about Paganini?
I don't really think Paganini was insane or crazy. In fact, I believe he was a quite intelligent kind of business man, who took advantage of people believing he was creepy and devil influenced.
Did Don Giovanni...and always laughed about the last fugue at the end when all the action has ceased....telling us basically that Don Giovanni got what he deserved in the end....it is rather hilarious.....was Don Giovanni another Drammatico buffo?
That fugue is fab though. It’s interesting. Yes, Don Giovanni gets what he deserves - the opera is called “il dissoluto punito” after all. But the ambiguity about it is partly what makes it so great and hard to interpret. Mozart certainly liked sex after all, and it’s one reason he seems to me to be more “healthy “ than Dave allows. There’s a really interesting discussion of this in Nicholas Tills’ “Mozart and the enlightenment “ if it’s still in print.
“The rake punished” is presumably what inspired the similar (and also marvellous) epilogue to Stravinsky’s “Rakes Progess”
A comedy, in the sense that order is threatened, roles are reversed, and then all comes back to normal. Leporello's transition into Don G's status and back (clothes, voice, and nearly one of his women) is prefigured in his first aria.
Crazy conductors? Rodzinski (no comment needed), Markevitch (terrorist sympathizer), Klemp...
Look at any photo of Berg and try not to think of Frankenstein.
No, that's Knappertsbusch.
He looked good as a young guy
Berlioz was pretty well out there, wasn't he?
See below...
One more thing about Mozart that reflects his not quite normal mind would be his strange scatological obsessions, even writing pieces such as "Leck mich im Arsch" and "Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber:"
Another composer who perhaps belongs on the list would be Carlo Gesualdo. His music became progressively more chromatic after he murdered his adulterous wife, possibly due to a mind unhinged by a guilty conscience.
I agree: everything about Mozart is insane... but i think you could have easily taken 8 more people or so in your list...
I could have. But that would have been insane.