THEY ALL HAD THE BUG!!
No, not the creative genius, uber-brilliant composer/performer bug....the SYPHILIS bug!
It's actually so much quicker to say who DIDN'T have syphilis than who did. And for reasons I can't quite explain, it really got going in the 19th century, particularly with artsy types. Not just composers but certainly just about every single famous painter;
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse Latrec, Manet, Munch to name just a few... and how about these guys: Hitler, Columbus, Napoleon, Abe Lincoln and JFK. The old motto was: A night with Venus, a life with Mercury. What??
Well, these guys and their drs tried everything and most of what was supposed to cure it, did...by killing the patient. Leeches, extreme heat, weird voodoo mixes of semi poisonous plants and venom. But when they started with Mercury/Salvasan (who thought that up?) it all turned for the worse. Most people now know that Mozart died of Mercury poisoning...by his own hand. And poor Smetana, Prague's hero first lost his hearing and then went insane (very common with syphilis). The ones that died of other causes (Hitler, Lincoln, etc) were showing pretty clear signs of the disease advancing and all were taking mercury. It just didn't work.
And before you go blaming the girls for all this decimation of glorious men, do remember that most of these girls were having to go thru weekly/monthly medical check ups to stay clean. They were trying to do everything they could just to keep working. In fact, working girls had the original Brazilian wax job (to try to avoid lice). But some gentlemen?? wanted that furry experience so the ladies would don a "merkin" yup, just like some folks say here...I'm proud to be a "merkin"....trust me, you'll never hear it the same again.
A merkin was a tuft of hair the ladies could strategically place for that home grown feeling. But it did prevent lice and these girls tried using protection.
No, the worst culprits were the belle monde ladies...society girls who actually reveled in the fact they had the disease! All those adorable Boucher paintings with the ladies all primped out and face painted with that oh so desirable black face patch to cover a syphillis pustule. How romantic!
So, just another reason to be grateful we live in the age of penicillin. Perhaps these great composers would've produced more masterpieces had they not all gone insane and died so brutally. Perhaps syphillis made them reach another realm. We'll never know. But now you know there was plentyyyyyy of nookie goin on.
Love from the road.
That was very interesting. I knew that most of them had syphillis. Shumann's famous "hand stretcher" was developed because he had it.
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