Some holiday spirits

[Chaszz]

Interesting article on great composers and the bottle. The bit about 'Brahms and Liszt' that he starts off with is Cockney slang meaning 'pissed', meaning drunk. A Londoner will say 'Brahms and Liszt' when he means he is too drunk to drive, or to do whatever. Often it is shortened to "Brahmsed."

The article must be taken with a grain of salt, because before modern methods of sanitation water was too dangerous to drink, and everyone including children was drinking ale or wine all day long.

Yet, how were these monumental (and as the author says, quasi-mathematical) structures built by people who were frequently falling-down drunk?

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/a-surprising-number-of-great-composers-were-fond-of-the-bottle-but-can-you-hear-it/

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

(I thought the meaning of 'pissed' was common knowledge)

And I always thought Sibelius's music sounded a rather 'slurred'

[Andante]

Mussorgsky's music sounds good to me yet he was an alleged over indulger.

[Jo498]

I think the problem is lack of data. There are high-functioning alcoholics today as well. They usually don't have hangovers, they just need a certain amount of booze to be able to work at all. We know very of high consumptions (about 2 bottles of wine a day or so) about Goethe who lived to the age of 82 and was probably considerably more busy than Beethoven because he was for years also a government official.
There are reports about Beethoven being disheveled and absent-minded that do not imply that he was drunk, it was just his way, especially when focussed on composing. We simply do not have enough details, I think. If he could compose at high intensity a few hours a day, it might have just been necessary to relax getting slightly drunk at night but it would not have led to hours of hangover.

In any case, Liszt, Brahms, Beethoven must have been high functioning if they were alcoholics at all and they also had fairly normal lifespans for their time. Mussorgsky seems a rather different case, he died at a far younger age and left a lot unfinished, his output is fairly small. I don't know enough about Sibelius but hard drinkers rarely live to the age of 91.

[Turner]

Satie was often heavily drunk too, and in the end, that stuff (including absinthe) got him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie