Music, Cancer, and Creativity

 

Franz Liszt and grief

As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. And while we expect this, it’s still a shock. Some die from cancer, some from old age or accidents. Too many die young, we think, before their time. Yet a life of attention and service to others is not diminished by the shortness of time, nor does the length of a life bestow any particular honor.

Not realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come, we can be so unnerved by an unexpected death that we wake up every morning fearing that someone else we love has died. And every strange ache, every cough and tick of our body, can make us fear that something is seriously wrong with us and we’re next to go. 

When someone we care about dies of cancer, we try to collect the meaning of their life and find the reason why they got cancer. Cancer, by itself, has no meaning, although what we do because of cancer can be transforming. Some of us will work through our grief and fears by creating something out of death’s raw materials, exploring its terrain by painting, writing, dancing, shaping pottery, or composing music, using our eyes, our minds, our body, and our ears as we seek to restore and affirm what is good in life.

 Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer and pianist (1811-86) who changed the music he composed to express the depths of his emotions over his father’s death from typhoid at age fifty, his son from tuberculosis (the cancer of his time, until a cure was found) when he was twenty, and his daughter from septicemia following childbirth when she was twenty-six. 

 According to Kevin LaVine, of the Library of Congress, Liszt’s “music grew … in its use of non-traditional harmony (akin to that of Beethoven in his own later years). His use of chromatically dissonant textures established a precedent that would inspire later composers, such as Wagner, Schoenberg, Berg; his use of harmonies based on whole tone and other non-traditional scales, as well as bitonality, anticipated the musical impressionism of composers such as Debussy and Ravel.”

Liszt wrote, “I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.” Each death challenged him to go beyond the boundaries of the musical forms he was taught in order to express the depths of his emotions and the dislocations of grief. While his music grew darker, it also became freer, and what he created would pave the way for the generation of composers that came after him. 

Dan Fogelberg, a singer and songwriter, died of prostate cancer when he was fifty-six. After he was diagnosed, he continued to write songs for his 2009 album Love in Time that includes the composition “Sometimes a Song.”

When someone dies as they are coming into their own, like the writer Nina Riggs, who died of breast cancer when she was thirty-nine, or the brain surgeon Paul Kalanithi, who died of lung cancer when he was thirty-seven, a layer of bitterness is mixed into our grief because we’re aware of everything they were about to do that would help others. Both were on the cusp of using their unique skills to inspire and help others.

Whether we have cancer, or someone we love develops it, its trauma changes how we see the world. It takes on darker shades, plays discordant music in minor keys, and threatens to make the world a sad and somber place. At the same time, we notice rays of brightness whenever people help those who are suffering. 

Take the emotions you are feeling — anger, despair, loneliness, hope — and do something creative with them.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow