An Addendum to the Story of Chopin

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Snoozing while listening to piano music is one thing, but drifting off while playing it? Now, that seems highly unlikely. And yet that’s exactly what 19th-century composer Frederic Chopin used to do: nod off and hallucinate about things like drowning at the bottom of a lake or seeing creatures emerge from the piano. What’s up with that, you ask? Well, for years, nobody really knew. But a new study in the journal Medical Humanities reveals that Chopin’s episodes may have been caused by epilepsy.

According to the Associated Press, some who were close to the composer thought this hallucination habit was part of his being an artist, or “the manifestation of a genius full of sentiment and expression.” Some of us now might assume he was just a little cuckoo. But after studying Chopin’s own descriptions of his episodes and the accounts of his friends and students, Spanish researchers Manuel Vazquez Caruncho and Francisco Branas Fernandez think he might have actually had something called temporal lobe epilepsy, which can cause brief, but complex, visual hallucinations — distinct from those caused by migraines or psychiatric disorders, but just like the ones Chopin used to have.

Of course, without the benefit of modern tests, Caruncho and Branas admit they can’t know for sure if their theory is correct. So, if you wanted to hang on to the more fanciful tale of “the manifestation of a genius full of sentiment and expression” you totally could. To me, though, amending the story to include epilepsy doesn’t make the story less romantic. On the contrary, it only makes Chopin’s achievements all the more impressive.

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