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Published: Monday, 20 January 2025 at 19:44 PM
Sex, scandal, symphonies: the dark history of composers and syphilis
The 19th century in classical music was the golden age of the Romantic composer: passionate, sensual, untrammelled in their desires. Composers such as Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt gaze out at us from their portraits – wild-haired, defiant, the very essence of the unchecked Romantic hero.
It’s an unfortunate fact, however, that another of the Romantic era’s key signifiers was the rampant spread of the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis. In some cases, the passionate, bohemian lifestyles of these iconic composers caught up with them, as they succumbed to this widespread disease and its disastrous, debilitating effects. The likes of Robert Schumann, Scott Joplin, Frederick Delius and Jean Sibelius are all believed to have suffered from syphilis, and its effects influenced their health, relationships, and ultimately, their compositions.
Here, we look at how this virulent disease affected the physical and mental wellbeing of eight great composers, and the ways in which their suffering may have shaped some of their most poignant and enduring works. We end with two great composers around whom rumours of syphilis have circulated – but we can’t say for sure.
What is syphilis?
A chronic and infectious disease, syphilis is primarily transmitted through sexual contact. If left untreated, it can cause severe long-term health problems affecting the brain, heart, and nervous system. The disease has had a major impact on human history – in particular before the discovery of antibiotics, when it was often untreatable and led to debilitating physical and mental conditions.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many prominent composers, writers and artists were believed to have contracted syphilis. The disease’s long-term effects – mood swings, hallucinations, paralysis, and dementia – blighted the later years of many of the composers on our list.
Seven composers who succumbed to syphilis
1. Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
During the early 1820s, the young Franz Schubert was at the centre of a tight-knit circle of artists and students who fathered together for salons and musical performances. It was a slightly different sort of evening, sometime in the late summer of 1822, that saw the 25 year-old Schubert and his friend Franz von Schober out on the tiles in Vienna.
This, however, was the ill-fated evening when, it is believed, Schubert may have contracted syphilis during a visit to a brothel. (Von Schober noted that at this time, ‘Schubert became increasingly dissipated, visited seedy districts, hung out in bars – and also composed some of his most beautiful songs in them, of course.’)
‘Each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again’
On March 31, 1824, Schubert wrote miserably to a friend: ‘I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain (…) Each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief.’
Tragic stuff. In fact, however, Schubert’s syphilis remained latent for the next three years, and the diary accounts from his friends describe a young man in good form and near the top of his powers. During the summer of 1827, however, Schubert began experiencing recurring headaches. By that autumn, the syphilis had taken hold again.
Schubert’s mental and physical health was declining, as can be heard in the beautiful but heartbreaking song cycle Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’), composed that autumn. His friend Johann Mayrhofer believed that Schubert wrote the cycle feeling that ‘life had lost its rosiness and winter was upon him’.
Schubert’s health declined steadily from this point on. However, it had little impact on his composing: in particular, during a six-week period in August and September 1828, just weeks before his death, Schubert composed a string of sombre masterpieces: the last three piano sonatas; six of his Schwanengesang songs; and the captivating String Quintet.
O November 5, Schubert went to bed with a fever. The syphilis and the toxic, mercury-based medications he was taking for it, were taking their toll, and his immune system was breaking down.
Schubert died on the afternoon of November 19, 1828. His brother Ferdinand wrote to their father that, near the end, Schubert had been delirious. One such hallucination went as follows: ‘On the evening before his death, though only half conscious, he said to me: ‘I implore you to take me to my room, not to leave me here, under the ground.’
2. Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
One of the leading lights of Italy’s bel canto school of opera, Donizetti also suffered from syphilis during his final years. The disease caused him to experience physical and mental deterioration, leading to paralysis, dementia, and eventually death in 1848.
He created some of opera’s most gripping psychotic episodes
What makes Donizetti a particularly fascinating (and poignant) case study here is the echo of his own mental decline in some of his most memorable protagonists. It’s striking that a composer who died in a state of mental disturbance from the adverse effects of neurosyphilis, also created some of opera’s most gripping psychotic episodes.
For example, in Anna Bolena (1830), Donizetti evokes the mental breakdown of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife, during her imprisonment in the Tower of London. (Some 16 years later Donizetti would find himself similarly incarcerated in a mental institution). The heroine of 1835’s Lucia di Lammermoor, meanwhile, is subject to hallucinations – and given one of opera’s most famous ‘mad scenes’, a showcase scene for generations of coloratura sopranos including Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas).
3. Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
In 1831, at the age of 21, Robert Schumann contracted syphilis from a prostitute. Writing in his diary at the time, the composer mentioned a ‘wound’ that was producing a ‘biting and gnawing pain’. Much later, not long before his death, Schumann scribbled a note that was recorded by his doctor: ‘In 1831 I was syphilitic and treated with arsenic.’
What’s interesting in Schumann’s case is that there was a gap of some 20 years between his initial contracting of the disease, and the final, grievous effects taking their toll. He would probably have believed himself to be one of the very fortunate few to come away unscathed from a disease that was, at the time, mostly fatal.
Fast forward to the year 1853, however, and Schumann’s past finally caught up with him. He was now married, with six children, living in Dusseldorf, Germany, where he was director of music for the city’s choir and orchestra.
Between January and November that year, Schumann’s mental health began to decline radically. His symptoms included rheumatoid pain, dizziness, aural disturbances, and an inability to speak or write for days on end. The syphilis had returned – with a vengeance.
Schumann also complained of demon voices in his head
Things came to a head early in 1854. On February 10, the composer was tormented by what he called ‘very strong and painful aural disturbances.’ Within a week, Schumann was hearing ‘magnificent music, with instruments of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on earth before.’ One theme, he claimed, was dictated to him by Schubert, who had been dead for quarter of a century.
Other effects, though, were far less welcome: Schumann also complained of demon voices in his head, accusing him of sinful behaviour. On more than one occasion he feared that he might be driven to attack his beloved Clara. She wrote that ‘My poor Robert suffers terribly. All sounds are transformed for him into music . . . He has said several times that if it does not stop, he’ll go out of his mind.’
Then on February 27, a cold and wet day, Schumann left his house in dressing gown and slippers, and walked into the river Rhine. Schumann would undoubtedly have drowned, or died of hypothermia, without the speedy help of some nearby fishermen, who pulled the composer out of the fast-flowing current and into one of their boats.
Five days after the apparent suicide attempt Schumann was admitted to an asylum at Endenich, a suburb of Bonn (Beethoven’s home city), where he spent the remaining 28 months of his life.
4. Bedřich Smetana (1824-84)
Czech composer Bedřich Smetana is best known for the jolly pastoral romp The Bartered Bride and the nobly patriotic tone poem suite Má vlast. These works, with their ruddy-cheeked wholesomeness, seem a world away from the stigma and pain of syphilis.
Yet it seems likely that Smetana, father of Czech classical music, may also have been afflicted. Late in life, the composer suffered mental deterioration and depression, and also lost his hearing. Tragically, like Schumann, the composer spent his last months in an asylum.
Smetana’s health issues first emerged in the late 1870s, when he began complaining of tinnitus – a constant ringing in his ears, which eventually led to total deafness. However, much like Beethoven before him, Smetana refused to let deafness get in the way of his calling, and continued to compose prolifically.
He became incoherent, sometimes violent
In 1879, Smetana wrote to his friend, the Czech poet Jan Neruda, with his fears of encroaching madness. By early 1883 he was experiencing depression, insomnia, and hallucinations, together with giddiness, cramp and a temporary loss of speech.
In October 1883, at a private reception in Prague, Smetana’s friends were disturbed by his behaviour. By February 1884, he was often incoherent, and sometimes violent. On 23 April his family decided that they could no longer look after him, and had him admitted to Prague’s Kateřinky Lunatic Asylum, where he died on 12 May 1884.
How much does this all fit with a possible syphilis diagnosis? The cause of Smetana’s death was registered by the asylum as senile dementia. It was, intriguingly, the composer’s family who, in defiance of the stigma around the disease, cited syphilis as the cause of his physical and mental decline. Then, in 1972, the German neurologist Dr Ernst Levin examined the autopsy and came to the same conclusion.
Some time later, an examination of samples of muscular tissue from Smetana’s exhumed body provided further evidence of syphilis. This has, however, been challenged recently by a Czech physician, Dr Jiří Ramba, who argues that neither the age and state of the tissues or reported symptoms at the time fit well with a diagnosis of syphilis.
5. Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
Like others on our list, the late Romantic composer Hugo Wolf is believed to have contracted syphilis from a visit to a brothel as a young man. And, again like others here, the disease remained latent for several years, allowing Wolf to carve out his own unique niche in the heady world of Viennese late Romanticism.
Wolf is best known for his Lieder, or art songs: indeed, he brought the German art song to a peak of creativity, and his songs were admired by Liszt and others. At his best, he was a prolific and inventive composer – but he was afflicted by severe bouts of depression, likely the effects of the syphilis. The disease may also have been behind his apparently moody and irascible temper as a young man, which got him expelled from the Vienna State Conservatory after arguing with his teachers.
He attempted to drown himself in the Danube river
Hugo Wolf’s last concert appearance took place in February 1897: soon after, he succumbed to a lengthy spell of mental illness. He began an opera, Manuel Venegas, in 1897, which he desperately hoped to finish before he lost his mind completely. From about the middle of 1899 onwards, however, Wolf was unable to write music.
In an echo of Schumann’s tragic story, he attempted to drown himself in Vienna’s Danube river: following this episode, he was admitted into a Vienna asylum, on his own request. His lover Melanie Köchert (wife of his patron, Heinrich Köchert), visited him faithfully in the asylum until his death in 1903. She took her own life three years later.
6. Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Another promising young composer, another brothel visit… you know the story from here onwards.
From 1888 to 1896, the young Frederick Delius spent eight years living in Paris, under the care of his uncle Theodore. He met writers and artists including August Strindberg, Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin.
The young Delius was, notes his biographer, ‘attractive, warm-hearted, spontaneous, and amorous’. Amorous indeed: at some point during this stay, Delius contracted syphilis during a visit to one of Paris’s many brothels.
Like other composers on our list, Delius was untroubled by the condition for many years. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1918 that he began to experience symptoms of neurosyphilis. By the early 1920s, he was almost completely blind, while growing paralysis confined him to a wheelchair.
Despite these severe disabilities, Delius’s creative vision remained undimmed. More practically, he was able to continue composing thanks to the devoted efforts of Eric Fenby, the young English musician became his amanuensis, transcribing his music as Delius dictated it. Several late, great Delius works, including Song of Summer and the Third Violin Sonata, were the result of this partnership between Fenby’s devotion and Delius’s defiant creativity.
7. Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
Scott Joplin was known as the ‘King of Ragtime’, a melodic precursor to jazz that was popular in the saloons and brothels of early 20th century America. It’s a somewhat tragic irony, then, that the man who will forever symbolise ragtime died of the disease that ran rampant through many of its major haunts.
Joplin, by now based in New York, first started to succumb to dementia from syphilis in 1916. He would die the following year. Although the music most closely associated with him is upbeat and full of life, Joplin’s late works – such as the opera Treemonisha – have much more darkness in them, perhaps reflecting his turbulent mental state and physical decline.
Buried in an unmarked grave
His biographer Vera Brodsky Lawrence has speculated that, only too aware of his advancing deterioration, Joplin was ‘consciously racing against time’ towards the end of his life: she notes that he ‘plunged feverishly into the task of orchestrating [Treemonisha], day and night, with his friend Sam Patterson standing by to copy out the parts, page by page, as each page of the full score was completed.’
On February 2, 1917, Scott Joplin was admitted to the Manhattan State Hospital mental institution. That was where he died on April 1, of syphilitic dementia, aged just 48. He was buried in an unmarked grave for the next 57 years: it took the global success of the 1973 film The Sting, featuring much of his music, for Joplin’s resting place to be properly acknowledged.
The fortunate case of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
The great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius is one of the lucky ones on our list. In her fascinating biography Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Glenda Dawn Goss reveals that, although premarital sex was illegal in Finland, prostitution itself was not actually banned until 1889. You can, perhaps, imagine the behaviour patterns that developed among Finland’s more sexually impatient young men.
No surprise to learn that late 19th-century Helsinki had its fair share of brothels, with come-hither names such as Eldorado, Alhambra, Mesopotamia, and, er, Green Hell. Sibelius (born 1865) was by all accounts something of a wild man during his younger years (Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s famous painting of a wild-eyed, drink-addled Sibelius and his friends tells its own eloquent story).
Sibelius told his friends that he had contracted syphilis. He was one of the fortunate ones in that he did not die from the disease, even though there were still no antibiotics or modern medicine at the time. No, Sibelius’s probable good fortune was to contract a non-virulent strain of the disease, with no open sores or ulcers. As a result, like many other sufferers, he would have made a complete improvement after about four years.
Two composers who probably didn’t have syphilis
1. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
There is some speculation that Beethoven may have suffered from syphilis, though this has never been confirmed. Some historians believe that the disease might have contributed to his deafness, general health decline, and the volatile personality of his later years.
When it comes to Beethoven’s hearing loss specifically, however, other reasons are put forward. For example, the great composer may have suffered from some form of hereditary condition that caused his deafness. There is evidence of health problems, including deafness and liver disease, in his family.
Lead poisoning has also been considered as a cause of Beethoven’s deafness: as we revealed elsewhere, an analysis of Beethoven’s hair showed elevated lead levels, which could have had a harmful effect on his hearing.
Beethoven did have a somewhat unfulfilled love life
Tinnitus is another possible cause of the great man’s hearing loss. Beethoven is known to have complained, in his conversation books and elsewhere, of a persistent ringing (tinnitus) and other ear-related problems, like sensitivity to noise, which could suggest chronic ear infections. If left untreated, these could have contributed to his hearing deterioration.
So, how plausible is syphilis as a cause of Beethoven’s ill health? The composer did have a somewhat unfulfilled love life, including various dalliances with students or women from a higher social class with whom he would not be able to sustain a relationship. There is also a fleeting mention of a visit to a brothel in his conversation books. However, it’s impossible to definitely cite syphilis as a cause of Beethoven’s ill health and death.
2. Benjamin Britten (1913-76)
A fire was lit under the biography of Benjamin Britten in 2013, when Paul Kildea’s biography of the composer alleged that Britten had (unknowingly) contracted syphilis, which led to the heart failure that eventually killed him.
Kildea, a conductor and music historian, maintained that Britten has probably been infected by his longtime partner and collaborator, the tenor Peter Pears, but that the composer had never been aware of contracting the disease. Britten underwent an operation on his heart in 1973, from which he never fully recovered, dying three years later in 1976.
‘Complete rubbish’
Kildea also argued that Pears himself would have been unaware that he was carrying the disease, in a symptom-free form much like Sibelius above. The couple would not have been informed because of the social taboo around syphilis, Kildea asserted: but the disease would, he argued, have precipitated Britten’s death.
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This hypothesis was, though, rejected by the cardiologist who cared for Britten during the last three years of his life. Michael Petch told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that it was extremely ‘unlikely’ that Britten had the venereal disease, and ‘complete rubbish’ that his surgeon would or even could have covered up the condition.