Musical Genius and Psychiatric Illness, A Lecture Demonstration

Richard Kogan, M.D., enthralled a group of about 150 NEOMED students, faculty and staff on Friday with his insights into how mental illness shaped the life of the great Romantic composer Robert Schumann.

A psychiatrist as well as a pianist, Dr. Kogan was visiting Northeast Ohio this weekend from New York City to perform with the Akron Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night. Mark Munetz, M.D., the Margaret Clark Morgan Endowed Chair and Professor of Psychiatry at NEOMED, invited him to give a lecture-demonstration at NEOMED’s Ralph Regula Center.

Dr. Kogan was an animated storyteller and a compelling pianist. Speaking to a lunchtime group, he confirmed that mental illness is, as many would suspect, more common among creative types, but he cautioned against over-romanticizing the situation. Dr. Kogan said that most people with a mental illness like severe depression or bipolar disease (which was apparently Schumann’s illness) are paralyzed by the disease, unlike Schumann, who channeled his suffering into a torrent of creativity that resulted in piano music, symphonies, and a flood of songs for his beloved wife, the piano virtuoso Clara Wieck.

Dr. Kogan first spoke to the group about Schumann’s troubled life: his family history of mental illness, his long struggle to win permission to marry Clara, his suicide attempt, and his final years, spent in a mental asylum. The psychiatrist-pianist then played excerpts from one of Schumann’s most well-known compositions for solo piano, Carnaval, to demonstrate Florestan and Eusebius – two imaginary characters in the piece, invented by Schumann to show two opposite sides of his personality.

The many characters in Carnaval, by the way, are party-goers at Carnival, the season (right around the corner) that leads up to Lent. Dr. Kogan’s lecture-demonstration was well planned and received, with students staying afterward for a chance to talk with their guest