The Fredösphere

You have to read all the way to the last page of the print version, but this month's New Criterion contains a morbidly fascinating tidbit from the life of Gabriel Fauré.  (The article requires registration if you want to read it all, including the relevant passage.)

[B]y this stage he had begun to find music a torment: not through simple deafness, nor yet through tinnitus, but through a frightful auditory distortion. Apparently concealing this from Saint-Saëns, he confessed it to his wife in 1919, having attended Verdi’s Falstaff:

All I could hear were such discordantly intermingled sounds that I really thought I was going mad … low-sounding intervals get changed as they go lower, and the high-sounding intervals get changed as they get higher. Can you imagine the result of this dichotomy? It is sheer hell.

Unable to carry out any executant or administrative duties, Fauré lost his Conservatoire directorship, two years too early to qualify for a pension. Somehow the gift of composing stayed with him, even as all other musical activity became insupportable.

Horrible.  He had entered The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat territory. 

Some maladies are rare, imposing on their victims the added insult of a dearth of empathizers.  Beyond that, there are some maladies like Fauré's that are so bizarre, in addition to being rare, that even potential sympathizers are lost to incomprehension.