NONFICTION - March 24, 1991

WAS MOZART POISONED?: Medical Investigations Into the Lives of the Great Composers by John O’Shea (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 238 pp.). Psychobiographies were all the fashion a few years back; no one could be understood, it seemed, unless subjected to belated, long-distance analysis. I can only hope that “Was Mozart Poisoned?” doesn’t signify the birth of a new, macabre trend in biography--the interpretation of prominent lives through minute detailing of debility. John O’Shea, a medical historian based in London, enumerates and evaluates the physical and emotional disorders that afflicted a score of composers--no doubt a reasonable way of looking at such lives, if one accepts the idea that great musicians have suffered disproportionately from medical problems--but only readers with strong stomachs will relish O’Shea’s descriptions of syphilis, tuberculosis, endocarditis, aphasia, brain tumors, ad infinitum. It’s interesting, at some level, to probe Beethoven’s cirrhosis and Percy Grainger’s sadomasochism, but the deeper, implicit issue--the extent to which maladies like these affected composers’ musical lives--necessarily remains elusive.