Music and Madness

Question Results

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Question:

Who, after being fished out of the Rhine by a boatman in February 1854, asked to be taken to an asylum for the insane?

Response:

	Johannes Brahms
	Robert Schumann
	Anton Bruckner
	Feedback: Answer: Robert Schumann. He entered a sanatorium in Bonn and remained there until his death in July 1856.

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Question:

Which Austrian composer likewise attempted suicide by drowning, this time in the Traunsee in 1898…and likewise asked to be placed in an asylum?

Response:

	Hugo Wolf
	Gustav Mahler
	Alban Berg
	Feedback: Answer: Hugo Wolf. His last piece of writing was 60 pages of an unfinished opera from 1897.

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Question:

‘Truly there would be no reason to go mad were it not for music.’ Which composer said this?

Response:

	JS Bach
	Tchaikovsky
	Scriabin
	Feedback: Answer: Tchaikovsky

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Question:

Diagnosed as suffering ‘delusional insanity’ after a mental breakdown initially, but almost certainly wrongly, ascribed to ‘shell shock’ suffered in WW1, this British composer spent his last 15 years in mental hospitals. Who was he?

Response:

	Charles Villiers Stanford
	George Butterworth
	Ivor Gurney
	Feedback: Correct! Ivor Gurney. He was gassed in September 1917, but had shown symptoms of bipolar disorder since his teens.

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Question:

An 1835 opera based loosely on a work byWalter Scott contains the most famous mad scene of them all. Name the composer and the opera.

Response:

	Meyerbeer's Dinorah
	Bellini's I puritani
	Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor
	Feedback: Correct! Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. After being forced into marriage Lucia murders her husband on their wedding night

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Question:

Henry Purcell’s 1683 song ‘From Silent Shades and the Elysian Groves’, which depicts the hysterical delusions of an insane woman, is better known by which name?

Response:

	'Mad Bessi' or 'Bess of Bedlam'
	'I love my love'
	'Musing on cares of human fate'
	Feedback: Answer 'Mad Bessi' or 'Bess of Bedlam'. It depicts Bess, driven insane by a broken heart.

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Question:

Viewing a set of eight Hogarth paintings that depict a young man descending into debauchery and then insanity provided a composer with both the title and the inspiration for a 1951 opera. The opera is The Rake’s Progress; name the composer.

Response:

	Bernstein
	Stravinsky
	Feedback: Correct! The protagonist, Tom Rakewell, deserts Anne Trulove to explore the delights of London in the company of Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil.
	Britten

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Question:

A composer largely remembered by history as a model of restraint and good humour, who composed the anthem ‘Insanae et Vanae Curae’?

Response:

	Josef Haydn
	Anton Bruckner
	Feedback: Answer: Josef Haydn. The title translates as ‘Vain and Raging Cares’.
	Jean-Baptiste Lully

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Question:

Confined in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in the 1750s, poet Christopher Smart passed the time by considering his cat Jeoffry in his Jubilate Agno. Who set his words to music in 1943?

Response:

	Britten
	Vaughan Williams
	Percy Grainger
	Feedback: Answer: Britten used the poem for his festival cantata Rejoice in the Lamb

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Question:

Which British composer, when not serving swan terrine to Orcadian policemen, wrote Eight Songs for a Mad King?

Response:

	Thomas Weelkes
	Madeleine Dring
	Peter Maxwell Davies
	Feedback: Correct! The 1969 piece contains a section in which the staves are arranged to look like a birdcage