Ravel and the FTD

Recent hypotheses suggest that Maurice Ravel, whose death is attributed to an unidentified brain atrophy or Alzheimer's disease, actually suffered from FTD (frontotemporal dementia), a still poorly understood disease, also known as Pick's disease.

This is a degenerative disease that strikes at a young age (between 50 and 60), slowly attacking and destroying the temporal lobes of the subject, progressively reducing their cognitive abilities. But the most interesting aspect of this pathology is that, in some cases, cognitive decline is accompanied by unconventional creative bursts, often going beyond the artistic conventions of the period and, when the individual is already an accomplished artist, can become explosions of genius. If so, Bolero could be the result of one of these. It was actually composed in 1928, when Ravel was 53 and was beginning to show the first signs of the disease, as evidenced by errors in speech and writing. This intriguing hypothesis, raised by Dr. Bruce Miller, neurologist and director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, is discussed in an article published in Medical Hypotheses (sorry, registration required to read).
The news was reported by the New York Times.

This, of course, takes nothing away from Ravel's genius, but it's interesting to think that abnormal mental conditions may be partly responsible for a work of such grandeur and intensity. Perhaps Ravel wouldn't have dared so much if he hadn't been ill?

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