Music vs. Life

[Florestan]

Do you think they are opposite?

Is it necessary for a great musician to eschew personal life?

Is being married and having & raising children a hindrance to creating great music?

My questions apply not only to composers but also to performers and singers.

[Florestan]

To answer my own question, no.

Bach, Mozart, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann..

[Maestro267]

OK great thread everyone! 

[71 dB]

OK great thread everyone! 

It is only a question of time when someone writes something that makes people want to respond. 

In my opinion music and life are not opposite.

[Mandryka]

Michèl Reverdy, "Divagations sur le temps musical." in Jean-Pierre Derrien, Images de la Musique Française

[Florestan]

Michèl Reverdy, "Divagations sur le temps musical." in Jean-Pierre Derrien, Images de la Musique Française

I'm not sure that Haydn and Mozart would have understood, let alone agreed with, much of that.

[steve ridgway]

Richard Strauss seems to have coped with being married and having & raising children quite successfully .

[Maestro267]

If you count writing Symphonia Domestica as "coping" then I guess in a way...

[DavidW]

Richard Strauss seems to have coped with being married and having & raising children quite successfully .

Most of the great composers had a personal life. I have no idea why this thread even exists.

[Maestro267]

Seems like a reasonable thing to discuss. Certainly better and less privacy-intrusive than "Why is [user] not here anymore?"

[Luke]

Seems like a reasonable thing to discuss. Certainly better and less privacy-intrusive than "Why is [user] not here anymore?"

Ironically I suspect the answer to that question is very often "because they have a life beyond GMG that is calling them"

[relm1]

I don't believe one has to sacrifice quality of life to be a good composer (or artist). I think being a composer is part of the great composer's identity so regardless of how their life is going, they are composers.  That's why we sometimes see great composers still composing in a concentration camp or something.  It is who they are though their circumstances might change positively or negatively. 

[San Antone]

Is being married and having & raising children a hindrance to creating great music?

If J.S. Bach is any example, then I would have to say "no".

[Florestan]

Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Dvorak, Verdi, Wagner, Faure, Debussy, Richard Strauss and surely many more...

Otoh, there we have Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel and surely many more  --- who never married and had no known children. I think that at least in Beethoven's and Brahms' case, married life, let alone raising children, would have been a torture and a hindrance for them and they would have probably been lousy husbands and fathers. Chopin's relationship with George Sand is the closest he got to a family life and it did not go very well, including relationships with her children. Poor Schubert was frustrated in his marriage dreams by the stupid Austrian legislation; perhaps a wife and children would have offered him a much needed stability and security. Handel is rumored to have been gay and Ravel to have been asexual so their cases are different.

In any case, there are obvious contradictions and incongruities between the creative artistic impulse and the constraints and drudgery that a family life inevitably imposes on a person. Balancing the two may not be as easy as it seems to be from the outside.

[San Antone]

Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Dvorak, Verdi, Wagner, Faure, Debussy, Richard Strauss and surely many more...

Otoh, there we have Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel and surely many more  --- who never married and had no known children. I think that at least in Beethoven's and Brahms' case, married life, let alone raising children, would have been a torture and a hindrance for them and they would have probably been lousy husbands and fathers. Chopin's relationship with George Sand is the closest he got to a family life and it did not go very well, including relationships with her children. Poor Schubert was frustrated in his marriage dreams by the stupid Austrian legislation; perhaps a wife and children would have offered him a much needed stability and security. Handel is rumored to have been gay and Ravel to have been asexual so their cases are different.

In any case, there are obvious contradictions and incongruities between the creative artistic impulse and the constraints and drudgery that a family life inevitably imposes on a person. Balancing the two may not be as easy as it seems to be from the outside.

Since this is a individual and personal issue for all artists, I fail to understand why you began this thread.  There is no hard and fast rule, nor is there any predictable pattern. 

This kind of thing has a way of working itself out, and the opinions of the parties involved are the only ones that matter.

[Florestan]

I fail to understand why you began this thread.

I could have started yet another thread about Your Top Five This or That but I thought we had enough of them already. 

Anyway, you're the second person in this respect. I'll wait for one more and then lock the thread. 

[Mandryka]

Well it's not totally uninteresting because of Gauguin, though there doesn't seem to be a musical equivalent - a composer who only thrived after he abandoned his family. Maybe Verlaine too, I don't know if his poetry improved as a result of his Rimbaud adventure. 

The Gauguin example is interesting because it may be an example of "moral luck." He couldn't have known that his decision to ditch everything and move to Tahiti would result in masterpieces, but it did and (maybe) that mitigates (ethically) the decision.

[Florestan]

Gaugin

Once is a typo.

Gaugin

Twice is quite possibly another typo.

Your luck you didn't name him a third time. 

Other than that, you have a point.

[Louis]

This is a pretty old and interesting question about how art is a different world and whether an artist must dedicate his whole existence to it.

Most composers lived a rather bourgeois live with wife and kids. There are major exceptions though like Berthoven or Schubert.

[DaveF]

a composer who only thrived after he abandoned his family.

Tchaikovsky and Janáček seem to have been happier without their wives, certainly.  And Herr and Frau Haydn, while never actually separating, lived separate lives from quite early on.