The Effects of Diseases, Drugs, and Chemicals on the Creativity and Productivity of Famous Sculptors, Classic Painters, Classic Music Composers, and Authors

Continued

LOUIS HECTOR BERLIOZ AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Effects of Opium on Their Creativity and Productivity

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was born in France. His father was a physician who taught his son to appreciate classic literature. Berlioz's family attempted to interest him in studying medicine, but after his first year of medical school in Paris, he gave up medicine and became a music student instead. Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatoire of Music in 1826. As a boy, Berlioz adored both music and literature, and he went on to compose the Symphonie Fantastique, in which the hero (a thinly disguised representation of Berlioz himself) supposedly survives a large dose of narcotic. Another interpretation of the Symphonie Fantastique is that it describes the dreams of a jilted lover (Berlioz), possibly attempting suicide by an overdose of opium. This work is a milestone marking the beginning of the Romantic era of music.²⁹ His creativity was fired in particular by a love for great literature and an unquenchable passion for the feminine ideal, and in the best of his works these elements conspired to produce music of exquisite beauty.

Berlioz took opium to relieve agonizing toothaches, but there is no indication that he ever took opium to become intoxicated, as the author De Quincey did. On September 11, 1827, Berlioz attended a performance of Hamlet at the Paris Odéon, in which the actress Harriet Smithson (Berlioz later called her Ophelia and Henrietta) played the role of Ophelia. Overwhelmed by her beauty and charismatic stage presence, he fell desperately in love. The grim program of Symphonie Fantastique was born out of Berlioz's despair because of the unrequited love he had for the English Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson.

Berlioz found a way to channel the emotional upheaval of “l'Affaire Smithson” into something he could control, that is, a “fantastic symphony” that took as its subject the experiences of a young musician in love. A detailed program Berlioz wrote prior to a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique, and which he later revised, leaves no doubt he conceived of this symphony as a romantically heightened self-portrait. Berlioz did eventually woo and win Miss Smithson, and they were married in 1833 at the British Embassy in Paris.

The program Berlioz wrote for Symphonie Fantastique reads, in part:

A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination in a paroxysm of love-sick despair has poisoned himself with opium. The drug too weak to kill plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by strange visions. His sensations, feelings, and memories are translated in his sick brain into musical images and ideas.

The underlying “theme” is obsessive and unfulfilled love. The symphony reflects Berlioz's hysteric nature with fits of frenzy, as revealed in his dramatic behavior (Figure 7 ).²⁹

It was obvious that Berlioz was addicted to opium, which is a yellow to dark brown, addicting narcotic drug prepared from the juice of the unripe seed capsules of the opium poppy. It contains alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine, and is used as an intoxicant. Medically, it is used to relieve pain and produce sleep. It is a tranquilizer and has a stupefying effect. Apart from alcohol, opium was the drug most commonly relied on in the 19th century, especially by poets for stimulating creative ability and for relief from stress.

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) was an English essayist. He wrote a rare kind of imaginative prose that was highly ornate, full of subtle rhythms, and sensitive to the sound and arrangement of words. His prose was as much musical as literary in its style and structure, and anticipated such modern narrative techniques as stream-of-consciousness.

De Quincey authored his most famous essay, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in 1821. He gave us an eloquent essay both of the delights and the agonies of opium abuse. He believed that the habit of eating opium was of common practice in his day and was not considered a vice. Originally, De Quincey believed that the use of opium was not to seek pleasure, but its use was intended for his extreme facial pain, which was caused by trigeminal neuralgia.³⁰ The essay's biographical parts are important mainly as background for dreams De Quincey describes later. In these dreams, he examined (with the help of opium) the intimate workings of the memory and subconscious. It is easily understandable that De Quincey “began to use opium as an article of daily diet.” He was addicted to the drug from the age of 19 until he died. The pain was not the only reason for his addiction; he also discovered the effect of opium on his spiritual life. By accident, he met a college acquaintance who recommended opium for his pain.

On a rainy Sunday in London, De Quincey visited a druggist's shop, where he asked for the tincture of opium. He arrived at his lodgings and lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. In an hour, he stated:

Oh heavens! What a revulsion, what a resurrection, from its lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of these positive effects, which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be corked up in a pint-bottle.

Other famous writers and poets have used opium. Coleridge saw the palace of Kublai Khan in a trance and sang its praise “in a state of Reverie, caused by 2 grains of opium.” Coleridge wrote: “For he on honeydew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise.” John Keats also tried the drug and stated in his Ode to Melancholy: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as although of hemlock I had drunk/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.”

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If our modern clinical chemistry, toxicology, immunology, hematology-coagulation, infectious diseases, and anatomic pathology laboratories had existed during the 16th through the 19th centuries, during the lifetimes of Cellini, Michelangelo, Arosenius, Munch, Van Gogh, Berlioz, De Quincey, and other famous artists, the clinical laboratories, especially those certified by the College of American Pathologists, might have unraveled the mysteries of their afflictions.

Although the famous artists discussed in this article were ill, many continued to be productive. Diseases, drugs, and chemicals may have influenced their creativity and productivity. After the diagnoses were established, aided by anatomic and clinical pathology findings, these famous artists may have benefited from resultant treatment with modern medical techniques. Modern pathologists' clinical laboratories are important in solving today's medical disease mysteries and would have been important solving yesteryears' medical mysteries.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge Leikula Rebecca Carr for her excellent stenographic and editorial assistance in the preparation of this manuscript; William Buchanan, Terrence Washington, and Mary Fran Loftus, Omni-Photo Communications, Inc, for their professional photographic and technical expertise; and Patricia A. Thistlethwaite, MD, PhD for her critical review of the manuscript.

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Last updated: 12/05

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