Reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Stephen Jobs is an unsettling experience. Not that there's anything wrong with the book itself; it's well-written, meticulously researched, scrupulously fair, and a class act all the way around. The shakeup results from the constant revelations of Stephen Jobs' infantile, cruel, vindictive, sometimes downright sadistic treatment of the people around him. He was prone to bursting out in tears when he didn't get his own way. Some people thought he might have a mental illness along the lines of a personality disorder or even bipolarity. Maybe he was just a total jerk who had an astonishing talent for product development. That he made some very cool things happen goes without saying.
I have no intention of devoting many digits—binary or fleshly—to Steve Jobs. I am particularly struck by his insistence that his roller-coaster personality was the result of being an artist. He used the word a lot. Artist. Real artists ship, he once said famously. Great quote. At the same time, I'm not so sure he was an artist himself. He hired and managed artists. Maybe the best description for Jobs is that now-faded, once-glamorous word impresario. He was a Sol Hurok for the information age.
That leads me to the subject of the so-called artistic temperament and society's tacit acceptance of infantile behavior on the part of people in the creative arts. When and how did those twin mindsets—the attitude and its acceptance—take shape? They couldn't have survived for ten minutes in the artistic world as it has existed for most of humanity's history.
For most of recorded history, there weren't artists so much as craftspeople, folks who made things for the use and enjoyment of others. There doesn't seem to be much of a distinction between making a clay pot and a tragedy; instead, all craftspeople were expected to turn out their products, maintain a modest demeanor, kowtow to the person upstairs, and in general keep their noses clean. Folks planning on a career in the arts learned early on how to play the diplomat, to get along, to ingratiate themselves with their higher-ups. Temperamental divas needn't apply.
History is filled with sad examples of those divas and the punishments meted out to them. Alessandro Scarlatti possessed a near-genius instinct for doing the wrong thing and wound up nearly destitute, begging for assistance just a few short weeks before his demise. Alessandro Stradella lived the high and dissolute life as he gambled and screwed his way through the burgeoning world of Italian opera and got himself offed by an assassin as a result. Nicholas Gombert had trouble keeping his pants buttoned around teenage boys and wound up sentenced to hard labor, rowing a galley like some slave in a Ben-Hur movie. Even the esteemed Josquin des Prez suffered his share of problems due to his well-known propensity for being prickly, expensive, and demanding. His work was so highly valued that he got away with it all, but he was a rare bird indeed.
Composers and artists were mostly obedient, at least on the surface. But servility began to fade once public support arose to replace aristocratic and churchly patronage. When a creative person was beholden only to the general public, instead of an individual or a committee, then it was the public that would make up its mind whether or not to reward or punish based on personal behavior. So as long as certain boundaries were maintained, artists began tasting some real freedom. At first, most parties involved well understood that responsibility came along with that freedom. Consider George Frideric Handel, possibly the first musician to practice what we would consider a modern career. After a start in Italy where he was employed by the usual round of well-heeled ecclesiastics, Handel settled in England where he could manage his own affairs and be his own man. Boom and bust followed, but he always managed to land on his feet despite setbacks that might well have floored a lesser man. He got away with his icky habit of plagiarizing the works of other composers, while his rival Bononcini was run out of town on a rail for the same offence. Handel was big enough to absorb that stain, just as he was big enough (literally) to withstand the many brickbats tossed his way concerning his lavish habits, gluttony, and corpulence. Handel was a fat cat. He may have been a closeted gay man, but that's something we'll never know for sure: that's the line that could not be crossed. He knew just how much of an artiste he could be.
Joseph Haydn either failed to develop his inner diva, or else he kept it firmly at bay. Over a five-decade career he ensured that his reputation remained reasonably clean. He was a court musician for over thirty years, after all—and no matter how much overall latitude Nikolaus Esterházy granted him, at no time was Haydn other than a palace official with duties and responsibilities. Once Haydn was no longer under the direct daily influence of an Esterházy prince, he could let his hair down a bit more. Nonetheless, the only items of salacious interest in Haydn's life are his extramarital affairs, and given the sad state of his marriage, nobody has ever thought ill of those. His fling with Rebecca Schroeter during his years in England (1790-95 off and on) was handled with tact and discretion, much to the dismay of future historians.
Despite a certain lauded movie, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not a counterculture hero who mouthed off to royalty and got away with it due to the immensity of his talent. Mozart knew how to get along in society and never stopped seeking patronage or a solid position in a court. Mozart as artistic personality par excellence just doesn't wash.
But Beethoven…ah. Now there's the archetype. Beethoven encapsulates just about every cliché we have about the classic artistic personality; moody, withdrawn, temperamental, self-absorbed, absolutely convinced of his own self worth. That makes perfect sense given that in a lot of ways we have defined what we think about artists based on Beethoven. Our modern-day notions of the Artist with a capital 'A' may very well stem from Beethoven's example. The sheer force of Beethoven's personality, his bigness of spirit, and his colossal talent combined to give him a chaotic, lonely, troubled life but an assured place on artistic Olympus. He alienated people, screwed up his relationships, and rarely lost an opportunity to shoot himself in the foot. At least he was sexually continent—but that doesn't appear to have been by choice.
Après Beethoven, le deluge. Everybody starting getting into the diva thing after Beethoven. Berlioz and his deliciously R-rated life. Liszt and his ladies. Robert Schumann's emotional meltdowns (caused, I hasten to add, by a bonafide bipolar disorder). Chopin and his lavender-scented moods and his odd relationship with Aurore Dudevant, a.k.a. Georges Sand. Felix Mendelssohn lived the life of a gracious gentleman outwardly and certainly never caused any embarrassment to himself or the profession—but he was also a tormented perfectionist, a chronic overachiever driven to work himself to death at an early age. Alexander Scriabin and his little drug habit.
But when you get down to it, most artists aren't particularly irresponsible or difficult. Most of them don't have the time or the inclination. They're too busy doing what they do, too engrossed in their innerspace. Some lack people skills. Some have no sense of money or time or responsibility. Others are first-class organizers and schmoozers, businessfolk and managers. But the screaming, temperamental diva type is pretty rare and rarely found at the higher eschelons of the profession. After all, people who have become major players in the arts didn't get there by offending others.