Robert Schumann’s Focal Dystonia

Abstract

Robert Schumann is one of the most prominent composers of the early romantic period. He was born in Zwickau, Saxony, in 1810. Early in his adolescence, he displayed extraordinary skills in piano playing and attempted to become a concert pianist. After an initial success, increasing technical difficulties hampered pianistic progress in the years 1831 and 1832. Finally, he developed a task-specific loss of voluntary control of the middle finger in his right hand. By means of a finger-stretching device, Schumann tried to improve the situation. In parallel, he composed the Toccata, Op. 7, a piano work which allowed high level virtuoso performance without the use of the middle finger of the right hand. However, from 1833, he almost completely gave up playing piano literature, but continued to improvise. Robert Schumann was suffering from a focal, task specific dystonia of the right hand, also referred to as pianist’s cramp. This disorder is characterized by a painless loss of skilled motor control in a task specific context. The neurobiological origin is seen in maladaptive plasticity of neuronal networks with blurring of afferent and efferent receptive fields of adjacent finger representations in the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia. The general basis of such a blurring may consist in a deficient lateral inhibition of synaptic pathways. Risk factors for developing musician’s dystonia are male gender, extensive cumulative practice time, extreme motor workload concerning the temporal and spatial quality of the affected movements and personality traits such as proneness to anxiety and perfectionism. All these factors can be demonstrated in Robert Schumann’s early life.