White nights,
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>> Psychiatrist/pianist Richard Kogan plays diagnostic detective with the depressive Tchaikovsky

ANXIETY PERFORMANCE: Dr. Richard Kogan

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Bi-coastal American band !!! (or “chk-chk-chk,” if you like) formed in 1996. Two years ago, New York’s Richard Kogan, M.D., offered Montreal a magnificent recital-lecture on the composer Richard Schumann at the behest of AMI-Québec (Alliance for the Mentally Ill). The evening showcased not only Kogan’s masterful piano playing, but also his eloquent and amiable public speaking style and deep knowledge of his subject’s personal history. Kogan speculates that Schumann suffered from bipolar disorder, and highlighted how the condition may have both hindered and helped the composer’s art—and how that might bear on the way mental illness, particularly among the creative, is dealt with today.

“The challenge in attempting to do diagnoses on historical figures,” explains Kogan, “is that anything I may say is of course speculative. It’s really difficult enough to get it right with the patients we actually see, who are living today.”

What helps Kogan in his diagnostic detective work is access to the reams of letters and diaries Schumann kept. The same goes for the brilliant Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), the subject of Kogan’s return visit. What gives this presentation wider resonance than the first is that it’s Kogan’s educated guess that Tchaikovsky suffered from clinical depression—major depression, specifically. It’s a condition that afflicts surprisingly large numbers of people. In fact, it’s the leading disability in North America.

Unlike Schumann, who benefited from his manic phases in both productivity and imagination (and was crippled artistically by his depressive periods), Tchaikovsky didn’t use his illness as a tool, but rather used music to counter his misery. Kogan points to the rich, fantastical beauty of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballets—Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker—to show how the composer was almost literally building fairy-tale realms of joy to escape to. “He was creating these worlds of beauty and grace, completely different from his inner turmoil. He said many times that music is what kept him sane.”

POSTAL PASSIONS
Tchaikovsky’s extensive diaries, which describe his state in painfully eloquent, even poetic terms, offer useful clues. “We know from his diaries, for instance” says Kogan, “that he felt especially bad in the mornings,” which could be seen as a clear symptom.

More material comes from letters to his brother Modest (later his official biographer) and his patron, the wealthy and eccentric Nadezhda von Meck, who stipulated that their friendship be strictly postal. “They wound up exchanging over 1,000 long, flowing letters which were extremely detailed, intimate and revealing. Almost everything we know about Tchaikovsky’s creative process, we know from these letters. But in 14 years, they never met one another face to face.”

Further exacerbating Tchaikovsky’s condition was his homosexuality, or rather the emotional repression and social anxiety that his place and time entailed. “In Russia in the 19th century, homosexual acts were basically punishable by loss of all civil rights and/or banishment to Siberia. He was, his entire life, in mortal dread of the social and legal implications of his being outed.”

Following a very brief sham marriage—“to provide something of a cover for what he called his ‘moral ailment,’ Kogan explains—Tchaikovsky attempted suicide and failed. Of this there’s little doubt, but substantial controversy attends his actual death to this day. The official story, one sustained over the decades by a Soviet machine determined to preserve the myth of one of Russia’s greatest artists, is that he drank a glass of tainted water and contracted cholera.

SYMPHONY OF SADNESS
Certain medical and historical details undermine the party line. “In St. Petersburg where he lived, there were always rumours casting doubt on the cholera theory. The story that’s emerged—or there’s at least a suggestion—is that he was involved in a sexual scandal with a teenager, a nephew of a member of the aristocracy. Classmates from the law school he’d attended told him that they’d essentially out him to the Tsar unless he killed himself.

“Part of what’s so poignant, if in fact he did kill himself, is that he had just written the Pathétique symphony. It was given its world premiere performance a week before his death. With that symphony, he was clearly at the peak of his powers. One could easily make the case that it was the greatest work he ever wrote. Just imagine how much music he had left to write.”

It’s a stark signal of what’s at the core of Kogan’s lectures. While he makes it clear that pharmacological advances have been a boon to mental health care, doctors should be mindful with their prescriptions, lest they dilute or derail artists’ creativity. Kogan also champions music not as a substitute for medication, but a therapeutic supplement to it in helping and hopefully healing the unwell. The benefits of creating, performing, even simply enjoying music have only begun to be explored, he says, and when their value is recognized, “There’s going to be an explosion in the use of music in healthcare.”

At the Oscar Peterson Concert
Hall on Wednesday, June 6, 7 p.m.,
$40, call (514) 486-1448 for tickets