Found an excellent Tony Palmer documentary about Sir Malcolm Arnold on YouTube today - having listened to the disturbing Ninth Symphony in the morning. I knew before this that the composer was a bit of a mess as a human being before this, but I did not realise the extent of his problems; and I knew how gifted a composer he was but had never quite taken in the range of his achievement. More than one contributor to the programme linked those two ideas together, which is in itself disturbing. Was the mental turmoil a kind of price for the gift of the music?
Actually, my answer to the question is a 'no'. I've ceased to believe in that archly Romantic trope of the madness of the artist. But it isn't an emphatic 'no'; the jury remains out on the verdict, and witnesses like Sir Malcolm don't exactly instil confidence that we can trust in some kind of essential sanity in the creative muse.
(You can find the documentary in question at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsuYbn8DaE.\, by the way. Well worth a watch - or even two. Great tunes throughout, even if you don't care much for MA himself.)
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