It is a hard illness to cure unless it is detected and checked from the start. He [Bruhn] has reached the point of being a really great dancer. He knows it, he feels it and people tell him so all the time. He now finds it hard to live up to his own immense reputation and is consumed by fears. His greatest fear is disappointing his public; that people will one day shrug after a performance and say, "So, that is the great Erik Bruhn?"
I was told once that it happens inevitably to all great bull fighters. At the height of their fame and powers they develop tremendous fears they will disappoint the crowds; that they will fail to live up to their expectations. And so they do something desperate, trying deliberately to repeat a previous successful feat that came spontaneously to them before. In the end some of them get themselves killed. Luckily our dear friends do not put their life at stake, but it's the same thing when nerves get in the way. . . .
Vera Volkova by Alexander Meinertz. 2007. Page 129.
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