Variations on Theme XVI: Images That Inspired Music
The pictures from the exhibition, or Kartinka, are the most famous example of visual art inspiring a musical composition. However, we can find many more such cases in musical history.
You walk through the exhibition, look at canvases, engravings, sculptures… and musical ideas form in your head. A beautiful idea. Composers are sensitive people, so it is not surprising that, in addition to nature, it is precisely creations from other sides of the spectrum of artistic creation that inspire them powerfully. Here are some examples. You can enjoy the images themselves and the music they initiated.
Sandro Botticelli: Primavera
Venus, Cupid, Mercury, Flora and other allegorical and mythological figures fill the canvas created by the elegant and tender hand of the famous Renaissance painter Sandra Botticelli. His Primavera is a celebration of spring, fertility, growth and marriage. Together with Botticelli’s other famous paintings The Adoration of the Magi and The Birth of Venus, you can see it in the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence. It forms a triptych that was inspired by the composer Ottorino Respighi. His symphonic work Trittico Botticelliano (Botticelli Triptych) quotes Vivaldi’s Jaro in the first part, and the Christmas hymn Veni, veni Emanuel in the worship part.
William Hogarth: A Rake’s Progress
A series of narrative engravings by the British artist William Hogarth became the inspiration for the creation of Igor Stravinsky’s opera. The composer saw her in May 1947 at an exhibition in Chicago. It is the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who has just inherited a huge fortune from his father and subsequently squanders it on drinking and gambling. His life gradually begins to fall apart until he finally falls into insanity at Bethlem Royal Hospital.
William Blake: The Book of Job
William Blake’s cycle of illustrations for the biblical Book of Job was created over many years. It was finally completed in 1826. The paintings follow the traditional plots of Job’s story, although of course they are made special by Blake’s personal interpretation. These paintings and engravings were the inspiration for Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ 1931 ballet Job.
Here is the magnificent Sarabande and Devil’s Dance.
Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Undoubtedly famous Japanese art, it is part of a series of paintings focusing on Japan’s Mount Fuji. In this particular piece, Mount Fuji is relegated to the background and a massive wave comes to the fore, threatening to overwhelm three fishing boats. It is said that this painting was the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s composition La Mer. We wrote about her in the section dedicated to compositions about water, the sea and sailors.
Wilhelm von Kaulbach: Die Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns)
In 451 AD, a battle took place between the troops of the Roman Empire and the army of Attila the Hun on the Kautalaun Fields. Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s painting is based on legends that claim that the fighting was so fierce that the fallen warriors ascended to heaven and continued to fight there. The painting became the inspiration for Franz Liszt’s magnificent symphonic poem of the same name. “Conductor, the entire first movement must sound dark and all the instruments must play very ghostly,” the composer prescribed in the score. He himself directed the premiere in Weimar at the end of 1857.
Illustration by Viktor Hartmann
The most famous example of the inspiration of paintings – the “Cardinka” mentioned in the introduction by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. They were created on the basis of the posthumous exhibition of the artist Hartmann in 1873. Mussorgsky’s piano suites were originally orchestrated by Maurice Ravel, and this version then successfully entered the world stage. The picture shows the Great Gate of Kyiv.
Arnold Böcklin: Island of the Dead
In fact, there are several versions of this work, but all generally showing the same scene of a lonely island with a cypress grove and a small boat on which a coffin and a mourning figure in white are sailing. The painting has since inspired many artists, such as Salvador Dalí or HR Giger. After seeing the painting in France in 1907, Sergei Rachmaninoff composed the brooding and ominous symphonic poem Island of the Dead. We wrote about it and you can listen to it in the section about Italy.
Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night
The night sky was an increasingly frequent subject for Vincent Van Gogh in the late 1880s. In an inimitable way, he conveyed to us the atmosphere of an eye cafe and vertigo, like a great view into the infinite universe. His paintings of the starry night inspired several composers. Henri Dutilleux’s orchestral work Timbres, espace, movement is subtitled La nuit etoile (Starry Night) after this painting, and the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote the opera Vincent about Van Gogh’s life. He later adapted this music into his Symphony No. 6, the first movement of which is entitled Starry Night.
Martinů: Frescoes by Piero della Francesca
The legend of the true cross is a cycle of frescoes that can be admired in the church of St. Francis in Arezzo, Italy. Bohuslav Martinů also saw them there and wrote his triptych based on the paintings of the genius from the dawn of the Renaissance, Piero della Francesca. “I tried to musically express that kind of solemn stillness and semi-darkness, that palette creates a colorful atmosphere filled with soft, calm and touching poetry. The intense colors of the resulting work are a worthy tribute to the style of the Renaissance painter,” said the composer.
Dance of skeletons
What seems horribly morbid to us was a frequent, even humorous subject of paintings and poems in the Middle Ages. Death has come to “dance” and invites everyone to dance: rich, poor, young, old, even children. Such was the medieval reality. The 1875 composition by Camillo Saint-Saëns was inspired by a 15th-century painting by Giacomo Borlone. In it, we first hear midnight striking and then a dissonant “call to dance”. In the rhythm of waltzes, the living and the dead are already swirling… brrr. Next time we’ll have a more cheerful topic.
Profimedia’s photo