Was 'Lullaby' Composer a Sorehead From Lack of Sleep?
July 13, 2000 -- In what could be the sleeper story of the year, a physician in Philadelphia proposesthat German composer Johannes Brahms, best known for his "Lullaby," may have suffered from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a serious disorder that could account for his notoriously irascible personality. "I am only too often reminded of the fact that I am a difficult person to get along with," he once wrote.
Brahms, who was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1833 and died in Vienna, Austria, in 1897, is just the latest in a series of towering historical figures who have fallen victim to the phenomenon of "diagnosis-in-hindsight."
For example, Joan of Arc was said to have heard voices that floated to her on the wind. Diagnosis: schizophrenia. Abraham Lincoln was thin and gangly, had a droopy eye, and poor blood circulation. He was often photographed wearing a shawl. Diagnosis: Marfan's syndrome, a connective-tissue disorder that can include those symptoms.
And in what may be the most undignified example, researchers from the Mayo Clinic suggested in 1988 that Napoleon Bonaparte may have met his empire-crushing defeat at Waterloo thanks to clotted hemorrhoids, commonly known as "piles."
But Brahms? Baritone George Henschel, who had the misfortune to bunk with the great composer on a concert tour in the 1880s, recorded that a few seconds after Brahms blew out his candle, "the room was fairly ringing with the most unearthly noises issuing from his nasal and vocal organs." Add this to contemporary reports of the composer's nearly pathologic lack of social skills, his obesity late in life, and his anatomy -- he had a thick, short neck. The signs all point, tentatively at least, to obstructive sleep apnea.
"I conclude that the hypothesis that Johannes Brahms suffered from OSA is tenable, and that OSA could help explain some important aspects of his life and personality," writes Mitchell L, Margolis, MD, in the July issue of the journal Chest.
"I've always had interest in matters musical and I read books and anecdotes about composers from time to time," says Margolis, who is also an amateur pianist, in an interview with WebMD. "I was reading one about Brahms and it really sounded like he snored very heavily: I just made the connection, and wondered, since he was such a crabby guy in many of the anecdotes, could he have had sleep apnea?"