Beethoven, Springsteen and the Music of Despair

Abstract

Using Ludwig van Beethoven and Bruce Springsteen as case studies, I argue that through a process of catharsis music can simultaneously express and transform severe psychosocial disability. Both musicians experienced an existential crisis around the age of 32, when already launched on successful musical careers. As well as providing written testaments to their distress, both expressed it in their contemporary musical compositions: La Malinconia and The Tempest; Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Dancing in the Dark. Both were experiencing fundamental problems of identity: Beethoven’s anguish was precipitated by his encroaching deafness and its effect on his future abilities; Springsteen’s by his growing sense of alienation from his cultural base. Both had strong factors predisposing them to depression, centred around longstanding difficult relationships with their fathers, rendering them angry at the world and themselves. But for both, music was a means of sublimation, of channelling their aggression and their despair, of finding purpose beyond the self. Beethoven’s belief in his mission to express the full range of his art to the world gave him the strength to continue, while for Springsteen the key was a growing awareness of his mission to map the distance between the American dream and American reality. Both experienced further periods of turbulence later in life, but were able to use their musical outputs – for example La Cavatina and Long Time Comin’ - as forms of maintenance therapy. For their audiences, their music continues to provide powerful antidotes to despair.