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The Truth About Composers Who Died of Syphilis

David Hurwitz

You read about it regularly in composers’ biographies. Schubert, Donizetti, Schumann, Smetana, Wolf, Joplin, Delius—all were likely victims of syphilis. Other STDs were just as common in ages past. Rossini, for example, suffered from gonorrhea throughout his later life, and was so full of enthusiasm for his urinary catheters that he kept them on display in his studio for the delectation of visitors. It certainly gives a new twist to his “Sins of Old Age”, doesn’t it?

You may well be asking why I bother to write about this at all. The reason is simple. Open discussion of the subject reveals telling facts about the differences between 19th century society and ours that answer some basic questions that might at first seem very puzzling. For example, assuming a basic similarity in behavior, why did some composers survive their early maturity while others did not? Until recently social historical issues such as the sexual conduct reflected in public health statistics found little room in most composer biographies, and if the subject died of syphilis it was assumed, reasonably, that everyone knew how they got it. Composers who did not die of syphilis presumably either did not have sex, or they did the dirty deed and got away with it. And that was that.

Now we know that the reality wasn’t quite so simple. Well, sometimes it was. There’s always Bruckner. Otherwise, a new generation of historians, many of them women working in the unfortunately titled field of “women’s history” (I say unfortunately because it is often the study of universally relevant aspects of social historical development and should not be pigeon-holed) have uncovered a vast quantity of data directly and fascinatingly applicable to our understanding of composers’ lives. One author who has taken full advantage of the latest research is Glenda Dawn Goss in her magnificent biography Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Sex, Drugs, & Sibelius

Goss’ book is both biography and social history; it seeks to place the composer in his context, and along the way it provides a wealth of facts large and small that might otherwise have gone unobserved. We learn for example that although premarital sex was illegal in Finland, prostitution itself was not actually banned until 1889. This fact alone speaks volumes about the behavior of married men, never mind randy students and bachelors like Sibelius. High-class hookers were imported from Stockholm (perhaps the legendary source of “Swedish porn” to this day?). The major brothels in Helsinki had cool names like Eldorado, Alhambra, Mesopotamia, Philadelphia, and most fearsome of all (Goss tells us), Green Hell.

We may speak of these facts jocularly, but the social cost of all of this was, of course, incalculable. The women employed in the brothels were invariably poor, ultimately sickly, and despised as vectors of illness, their children bastards unlikely to survive infancy. Sibelius was a chronic hypochondriac. He was also known as something of a wild man during his student periods in Berlin and Vienna, and he reported to his friends that he had contracted syphilis. In the period before antibiotics there were treatments of varying effectiveness, including dangerous heavy metal injections and a primitive form of inoculation with, believe it or not, malaria. (Yech!). Goss relates that Sibelius assured his wife-to-be, Aino, who was well aware of her fiancé’s reputation, that he had received this inoculation before they were married.

Did He, or Didn’t He?

Now this is all very interesting, but it doesn’t answer a very basic question. Did Sibelius have syphilis or didn’t he? And if he did why didn’t he go blind, insane, and drop dead much sooner? After all, Sibelius made it to the ripe old age of 91, smoking and drinking all the way, while his wife did even better: she was born in 1871 and died in 1969. They had six daughters, five of whom survived infancy.

So Goss did the smart thing. She went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and she actually asked an expert. As it turns out, under normal circumstances syphilis is only contagious when it is virulent—that is, when there is an ulcer or open sore. However, after the first four years following infection the majority of people (some 90%) self cure and will never experience the most horrific later-stage symptoms of tertiary syphilis—the ones that many of us saw in those high school sex-ed VD scare films.

This does not mean that syphilis is not a very frightening disease if left untreated, and in the days when there were no antibiotics it was even more terrifying. Its second-phase rash, which most people will get several weeks after the initial chancre sore disappears, is disgusting, but it’s worth remembering that life in the days before deodorant and toilet paper was pretty disgusting anyway, so it may be that fewer people noticed. Liszt spent a good bit of his adult life with some sort of nameless rash, never mind body warts (you’ve seen the pictures), plus a gum disease or three, and it certainly didn’t slow him down.

The only point I want to stress is that the list at the start of this article consists of the especially unlucky 10% that did not beat the odds, and that the rest of the musical world comprised normal participants in a society that was in some ways similar to our own, but in other ways quite different on account of its need to adapt to the circumstances of both human nature and the primitive medical science of the day. It is helpful to know that contracting syphilis, as many surely did, was not an automatic death sentence if only because it confirms that composers who did not die of the disease also did not spend their bachelorhood trapped in some strange, pre-modern form of celibacy—except for Bruckner. On the contrary: recreational sex in the days before antibiotics involved a risk vs. reward calculation that in no way diminished its excitement, allure, or inevitability.

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