Greg Stepanich

Creative mind, overstuffed body

I did a book review last week of a new novel called Intoxicated, a nifty tale set in Victorian England in 1869 about the creation of a soft drink called Rhubarilla. It’s a semi-Dickensian tale with a hint of the Coca-Cola story, or at least the cocaine part of it, but for that, I’ll just refer you to the book. It’s a fun read.

The writer is a young Yorkshireman named John Barlow. I visited his site the other day, and found that he does a fun “open blog� that makes entertaining reading. The piece in question that caught my eye, not least because of the bulbous-stomached man pictured there, was a funny rumination on writers and how thin most of them are (you can read it here; it's the April 17 entry).

That, of course, got me to thinking about composers and instrumentalists (not singers, which is another subject altogether) and their standards of buffitude. I’ll say right off the bat that I certainly don’t fit Barlow’s ectomorph theory of writing: I’m a pudgy endomorph, and no, I’m not proud of it, but the fat facts are the fat facts.

Now, most of the instrumentalists I can think of seeing over the past few years have essentially been on the slender side. There have been one or two I can think of who were heavy, but most of them were older men, and they probably started playing when being musical and tubbulous was something to which you would aspire.

But composers don’t really fit the Barlow theory, either. I’ll review a few:

a) Rossini. Became quite heavy in his later years, and he paid for it. He had years of bad health, and it caused him extra pain at the end when he had cancer surgery in his nether regions with a minimum of anesthetic.

b) Schumann. Slender in his younger days, he became obese toward the end, and apparently suffered from high blood pressure, among his other ailments.

c) Brahms. Also thin in as a young man, became quite heavy as an adult. Many writers have speculated about the widely spread figurations in his piano music, arguing that he wrote things that way because he couldn’t get his hands in front of his belly while sitting at the piano.

d) Tchaikovsky. Certainly slender and tall as a younger man, when the young Igor Stravinsky saw him at the theater, he remarked about how fat his back looked.

Schubert was a very short man, and some thought him chubby, but others say he was solidly built, Georges Bizet, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his hands off the petit fours, and was considered plump.

And the cartoon at the top of this entry is by Joseph Goupy, a friend of George Frideric Handel's who was poking fun of the composer's fondness for food (there's a nasty poem that goes with it). Handel was not amused; he took Goupy out of his will.

I don’t know whether this tells us anything at all except that I know too much about the physical appearance and ailments of some long-dead musicians. But maybe it does: Perhaps there is some connection between the kinds of music you write and the way your body is shaped.

Anybody have a thought about that? Post away.