Many of the indelible experiences of my life have come while performing Robert Schumann’s works. His music is poeticgold88 slot, emotionally direct even in its stranger moments and suggestive of deep vulnerability: a unique and potent combination. On the concert stage, where everything becomes more highly charged, it can be overwhelming.

Earlier this month, I played his piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I came offstage feeling altered, as I so often do after performing Schumann’s music — as if I had seen his innermost self and, in the process, accessed my own. Moments later, in the green room, I heard the questions I’ve grown accustomed to but still steel myself against: Had Schumann already gone mad when he wrote this work? Can I hear the madness in the music?

Schumann did indeed suffer from severe mental illness; he was institutionalized for the last years of his life. And there is no denying that as his condition worsened, the character of his music changed: It turned inward and grew increasingly static, still conveying his essence but somehow more aloof from the listener. And yet these questions always bother me. They reduce this beautiful, complicated, staggeringly gifted person to a pathology.

More dangerously, they indicate a persistent and pernicious stereotype: the tortured artist. Think of the popular conception of the raging Beethoven, the anguished van Gogh, the volatile Caravaggio, the idiosyncratic Vladimir Horowitz, the guitar-smashing rock star.

This is a myth, one that has been useful for the promotion of artists — crazy, like sex, sells — but deeply damaging to the artists themselves. It is a myth that renders the artist simultaneously superhuman and less than fully human. He (the mythical artist is historically a he) does godlike things; he has no control over his impulses. He knows how to tame lions or conjure infinity; he cannot be expected to know how to tie his shoes. He is totally at home in the world of art; he is utterly out of place in the actual world.

Paradoxically, this presumption of emotional instability has made it not easier but more difficult for artists to be forthright about our mental health. We are fighting a preconception that disembodies us and has the potential to make us less employable. Carrying a whiff of untamability is romantic; revealing the sometimes profound struggle of making music and living life is a turnoff. Perhaps Schumann knew this: Often, he returned to his music after it had been published, removing many of the strangest — and sometimes most characteristic, and most beautiful — details. Maybe the fear of what they might reveal was too strong.

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