The Voice of Aletheia

Schubert
Art of suffering

Very often a creative exaltation is a result of a weak physical condition, creative euphoria is other face of a psychical depression, an apparent excess of energy non uncommonly is act of force. Some people say that real creativity arises from the intensity of the emotional experience.

When Franz Schubert was hired as an educational assistant he said: “It’s true, every time when I was composing that little gang of kids disturbed me so much that I would lose the thread. Of course I would give them a good hiding.” In one moment he decided to escape from the oppression of school….

He accepts the job of a private teacher for two young countesses: “Not a soul here has the least feeling for true art. So I’m alone with my beloved and must hide her in my room, in my piano, in my breast. Although on the one hand this makes me sorrowful, on the other, it exalts me all the more.”

“My work exists only due to my understanding of music and my pain; those being born just from pain seem to be least appreciated”.

Pain alone, no matter how extreme it is, cannot produce any art.

Escape into the neurosis rather than sticking to passivity, escape into the art. Art becomes a second nature. To live, to survive, Schubert had to produce art. Work is a neurosis and at the same time the only possible therapy for the neurosis. It doesn’t mean necessarily that Schubert was suffering even while working, on the contrary hours dedicated to work were the only ones free from suffering.

Was the suffering that preceded it necessary as a stimulus?...

No one enjoys suffering. Suffering is a capacity and therefore also an art. Who is able to suffer, who knows how to live with his own pain, and not who restrains it or defends himself from it, doesn’t have to bring or to endure the pain, but to effuse it, transmit it.

“Does cheerful music really exist? I don’t know any.”

It’s a case of an artist for whom solitude is a necessary condition for a creative work that, on the other hand, brings a social isolation. Who begins to suffer, will continue to suffer, because his organism has become receptive to pain.

“No one feels another’s grief; no one understands another’s joy”

It is impossible to suffer together because sentiments are cut out to fit an individual and they elude the language.