The Arts Entwined

Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century

Marsha L. Morton, Peter L. Schmunk, Marsha L. Morton, Peter L. Schmunk, Marsha L. Morton, Peter L. Schmunk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135672775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection of essays by musicologists and art historians explores the reciprocal influences between music and painting during the nineteenth century, a critical period of gestation when instrumental music was identified as the paradigmatic expressive art and theoretically aligned with painting in the formulation ut pictura musica (as with music, so with painting). Under music's influence, painting approached the threshold of abstraction; concurrently many composers cultivated pictorial effects in their music. Individual essays address such themes as visualization in music, the literary vs. pictorial basis of the symphonic poem, musical pictorialism in painting and lithography, and the influence of Wagner on the visual arts. In these and other ways, both composers and painters actively participated in interarts discourses in seeking to redefine the very identity and aims of their art. Also includes 17 musical examples.

CHAPTER 1
“From the Other Side”

An Introduction

MARSHA L. MORTON

There is only one Art; painting and music are only different fields, part of this general Art; one must know the boundaries, but also how it looks from the other side; yes, the painter who is musical, just as the composer who paints, these are the true, genuine artists....¹

—CARL FRIEDRICH ZELTER

When Carl Friediich Zelter made these remarks during a conversation in 1783, few would have imagined their prescience. By the turn of the next century synesthetic beliefs were to nurture a truly symbiotic relationship between music and painting, with artists from Debussy to Gauguin enriching and reformulating their art through mutual exchange. While this direction culminated in twentieth-century abstraction and the creation of musical compositions inspired by paintings or incorporating visual elements, the nineteenth century represented the critical period of gestation when music "came of age" and painting approached the threshold leading into nonobjective realms. As Charles Baudelaire observed, the arts aspired to a condition "in which they len[t] each other new powers."²

Through selected topics, the essays included in this volume explore specific details of this interchange. Some provide new information for familiar figures; others discuss individuals (Saint-Saëns, Monet, Van Gogh) who have been infrequently mentioned in this context. Although considerable interest has been shown in this subject during the previous decade, primarily among German scholars, few publications have appeared in English. Our book is intended to address this omission and to stimulate further investigations.³

Music's meteoric ascent among the arts in the nineteenth century, rising beyond its more humble status in the eighteenth century, is a well-known fact. Ut pictura poesis was succeeded by ut pictura musica, and painters, seemingly ever the runners-up, shifted their sights to a new model. It is therefore not surprising that more painters were inspired by music, and in more fundamental structural ways—music leading to radical developments in abstraction—than composers were inspired by the visual arts. As Wolfgang Dömling and Karl Schawelka have recently argued, the notion of "musicality" in painting is not matched by a corresponding doctrine of "painterliness" in music which is equally com pelling.⁴ Additionally, efforts to pinpoint influence from the visual arts in music are muddied by the fact that those influences are often entangled with literary sources (characterization in music, for example, does not reflect a uniquely pictorial quality but a narrative one that could also be found in a written text) and with general vision (musical evocations of nature do not distinguish between "real" landscapes and their painted versions). The varied range of musical inspiration is demonstrated by Thomas Grey in Chapter 4 where he argues that the Hebrides Overture references Mendelssohn's trip to Fingal's Cave, depictions of the site, and paintings and poems of the mythic Ossian legend. In all cases, however, the composer is crossing borders in an attempt to expand the range of his art to things extramusical.

The essays in this book deal with visualization in music in the broader meaning of images seen as well as the more specific one of paintings viewed. Considered from this perspective, the reciprocal influence between music and the visual arts becomes central to discourses on the very nature and identity of both mediums: absolute versus program music (and tone painting), and narrative representational styles versus abstracting symbolic ones in painting. Encoded in these options are ideological choices regarding artistic meaning and the determining role of content and/or form, issues that are at the heart of discussions about nineteenth-century art.

Throughout the previous century roles had been reversed, with composers seeking to incorporate elements from the visual arts and literature. Judged according to traditional classical standards of imitation, music was at the bottom of the hierarchical heap, struggling to maintain a ranking as a "fine" art. It did so by copying nature, either externally (through its sounds) or internally (emotions). Musical compositions that evoked auditory images were referred to as tone paintings. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an enthusiast, described the genre in terms of the verbal and visual arts: "Imitative music, using lively, accented, and, as it were, speaking inflections, expresses all the passions, paints every picture, renders every object, submits the whole of nature to its ingenious imitations, and by this means conveys to the human heart those sentiments proper for moving it."⁵ The position of tone (or word) painting in the early nineteenth century is discussed further by Stephanie Campbell in Chapter 3 through her comparison of the role played by visualization in Zelter's compositional practises and in Goethe's conception of music.

Music's mimetic and linguistic capacities were obviously limited, however, and in the opinion of many, its borrowings from the other arts only served to underscore its inadequacies. Music was customarily perceived as an agreeable entertainment whose "sentiments" did not compensate for failures in the realms of cognition and reasoned thought. Kant dismissed music as "least amongst the fine arts, because it plays merely with emotions" and "communicates by means of mere sensations without concepts." In comparison to the representative arts it was seriously deficient. They "greatly excel it, for they freely stimulate the play of the imagination in a way that is suited to the intellect" and "create lasting impressions."⁶

When Kant published these remarks in 1790 reevaluations about music were already underway in England and Germany in writings by Charles Avison, Adam Smith, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm Heinse. Nascent melomania was predicated on changes in aesthetic thought found especially in theories of the sublime, on developments within music itself, and on the new public concert venues. In the Romantic doctrine articulated by Wilhelm Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, the brothers Schlegel, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, music was now valued for its vague indeterminate content, previously regarded as its greatest weakness. Through its nonreferential suggestive forms, music was perceived as evoking an ineffable essence more metaphysically profound than anything communicated through language or sight. Music offered a glimpse of the absolute by way of the infinite or the inner soul.⁷ Significantly, this transformation was inextricably linked to new forms of instrumental music (symphonic and keyboard), still in their infancy, coupled with a rejection of music that was imitative or accompanied by a text. In his essay "Symphonies" Tieck described music as an abstract structure that explores inner realms located beyond empirical reality. Painters thoughout the nineteenth century would embrace and emulate this model:

Art is independent and free in instrumental music; it prescribes its own rules all by itself... it completely follows its dark drives and expresses with its triflings what is deepest and most wonderful.... [the]sounds which art has miraculously discovered and pursues along the greatest variety of paths ... do not imitate and do not beautify; rather, they constitute a separate world for themselves.⁸

The most indefatigable proselytizer of instrumental music was Hoffmann, whose 1810 review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, considered to be the quintessential document of Romantic theory, was itself a polemic for the supremacy of instrumental over vocal music:

Beethoven's music presses the levers of terror, of fear, of dread, of pain, and awakens the endless longing that is the nature of romanticism. Beethoven is a purely romantic composer (and precisely because of that, a truly musical one,) which may explain why he is less successful with vocal music, which does not permit indefinite longing....⁹

Such adjectives of passion were foreign to the world of Baroque music and accompanied changes in composition introduced during the classical period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New technical improvements during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including piano pedals, brass instrument valves, and improved fingering on wind instruments enabled composers, beginning with Beethoven, to broaden the expressive range and drama of orchestral sound by elevating tone color and enhancing textural and timbral variety. As Charles Rosen has observed, sound and orchestral color became fundamental to musical structure in a more determining way.¹⁰

The development of instrumental music was also facilitated by the growth of the public concert. Composers, no longer subject to the requirements of court and church, were freed from the necessities of text and occasion/function, while listeners became observers rather than participants. Within the concert hall, standards for audience behavior changed under the impact of the new Romantic veneration of music. Eighteenth-century practices, where listening was combined with social interaction during performances, could hardly be maintained if the audience was to experience a moment of spiritual transcendence.¹¹ Accordingly, lights were dimmed and silence maintained. This new attitude of contemplation, akin to states of religious devotion, has been identified by Schawelka as essential to the concept of the "musical" in painting. He has argued that artists sought to evoke through their work responses similar to those elicited by music in which the enraptured listener absorbs the sounds as if in a dream state.¹² Certainly, museums would come to resemble concert halls in their imposed tone of hushed reverence. Wacken roder described the "correct" way to listen as an immersion in a "current of emotion" in which "all destructive thoughts" are banished.¹³ Central to the process was the disengagement of the conscious mind: comprehension would destroy the magical power and irrational mystery of the experience. This attitude was reflected later in Thomas Carlyle's ecstatic remarks: "Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!"¹⁴ In a similar vein Mme. de Staël had proclaimed that "the delightful reverie into which it [music] throws us annhilates all thoughts which may be expressed by words;... music awaken[s] in us the sentiment of infinity...."¹⁵

No greater indication of change in the status of music can be found than by comparing the remarks on concerts and instrumental music by the eighteenth-century aesthetician Johann Georg Sulzer with those of Arthur Schopenhauer. In 1793 Sulzer wrote: "In the last [lowest in artistic ranking] position we place the application of music to concerts, which are presented merely as entertainments, and perhaps for practice in playing. To this category belong concertos, symphonies, sonatas, and solos, which generally present a lively and not unpleasant noise, or a civil and entertaining chatter, but not one that engages the heart."¹⁶ Thirty years later Schopenhauer observed that "a man who gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony experiences the metaphysical."¹⁷

Through Schopenhauer's writings music became a superstar as it emerged from Kant's earlier banishment to occupy an elite position within a philosophical system. Schopenhauer provided a theoretical explanation and justification for Romantic intuitions about music's unique nature. He maintained that objects of the phenomenal world, which are also those depicted in paintings and described in language, are merely indirect representations of the will through "Ideas," while music, in its complete independence from empirical reality, objectifies the will:

Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reaso...