Famous music composer, Robert Schumann, spent the end of his life experiencing auditory hallucinations. Auditory hallucinations usually manifest themselves through one or more voices in the sufferer’s head and are often associated with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Schumann’s diaries state that he suffered perpetually from imagining that he had the note “A5” sounding in his ears. The musical hallucinations became increasingly complex. One night he claimed to have been visited by the ghost of Schubert and wrote down the music that he was hearing. Thereafter, he began making claims that he could hear an angelic choir singing to him. As his condition worsened, the angelic voices transmogrified into devil voices. Much of the music created during his “madness” was rumored to have been destroyed by his wife Clara and their close friend Johannes Brahms. However, some years later Brahms published Opus 23, a piece for four hands called Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann in honor of the composer.
Dennis Janssens 