Where Do We Go When We Go Mad?
“and what is a madman, really? He is a man who preferred to go mad rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.”
— Antonin Artaud

To escape the army, I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. And that turned out to be one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I was there for “only” three months. And the best part — they let me out to practice the piano outside. Everything else I could live with.
You’re probably wondering: what did I see there? I’ll tell you gladly. The pure ones.
A painter. A poet. A man who only spoke to the ceiling. As for those who were “perfectly normal” — the doctors and nurses — that was the truly frightening part. I fell in love with one of them. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
All the patients suffered from the same thing: they couldn’t cope with life. That much was obvious. But each of them was coping with something else entirely. Something life doesn’t actually help you with.

The painter barely spoke. Almost never. But one day I came across him working — and his eyes were burning. The poet felt what others prefer not to feel. And quoted exclusively himself. Every form of madness has its own logic, Shakespeare said.  

Schumann, after his breakdown, heard a single note in his head. Continuously. And yet wrote music so unusual and of such density and despair that even Brahms and his wife Clara didn’t know what to do with it — and refused to publish it. (For example, listen to his Four Fugues, Op. 72.) Wolf wrote in bursts — twenty songs in a week, then nothing, then twenty more — and then a psychiatric hospital. He would have been one of us. I might have reminded him of his own songs ..the ones I can’t stop playing.) Duparc wrote seventeen songs and then …went silent for forty years. Burned his manuscripts. Imagine ..Forty years. 
Piaf walked onstage in a state most people wouldn’t leave their bedroom in. And sang with a vulnerability no one has matched since. And Bergman simply picked up a camera and went there ..where God is quiet, where shame is enormous, where a human face in close-up says more than any text. He was after the whole unbearable truth of being alive.

And so it occurred to me — why not repeat my own “wonderful experience,” but this time in art. To follow them, and see where they all go when they go mad.

The evening begins with Schumann -his Dichterliebe, where each song is one step further in, toward a place you don’t always return from. Then Bergman -fragments from his films and interviews with a man who looked into the dark without fear. Then the songs of Wolf and Duparc -two very different ways of flying away. And we end with Piaf who spent her entire life on the very edge of this madness, and sang from there.

And in this journey into mad-ness, I have a partner in crime : the fantastic Austrian soprano Ute Gfrerer, who has performed with us before. She has that rare quality: she re-lives every word she sings. Which, given the program, may require some therapy afterwards. At your own expense.

If the world is quietly and gradually going mad — and all evidence suggests it is — then perhaps the only question worth asking is not whether, but how. Schumann, Wolf, Duparc, Piaf, Bergman knew how.
Come and find out.

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Artistically yours,
Leon