“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.”
Modest Mussorgsky
As philosopher Richard Wollheim says, art is “one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture.” In its simplest manifestation, art is a form of communication that serves as a vehicle for the expression of emotions and ideas. As ideas and beliefs are culturally specific and constantly changing over time, there really is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art. That being said, the classical branches of the visual arts are identified as painting, sculpture and architecture. Literature and poetry are considered part of the humanities or as one of the arts, while music, alongside theatre, film and dance belong to the performing arts. In this section you will discover not only specific explorations of individual art forms, but also a more detailed probing of the relationship between the visual arts and music, including painting and music, sculpture and music and architecture and music. Originally, poetry and music were treated as a unity, but gradually they have become more independent. Nevertheless, the two art forms have never forgotten their shared genetic makeup, and been intertwined for millennia. Art and music have engaged in a dynamic relationship that reveals a diverse range of human activity intended to be appreciated for their beauty.
We don’t generally think of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) as a song composer but he wrote them from his earliest days as a composer in the early 1890s until the early 1930s. The poets that he set were some of the
In his delicately titled, Ariettes oubliées (Forgotten Little Songs), Claude Debussy (1862-1918) took the poetry of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) and created a song cycle to match the stylistic subtleties of his poems. Debussy met the older poet via his mother-in-law.
We associate the sound of Debussy with his ‘impressionist’ music of works such as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune or his piano music. In some of his most important songs, however, we have more of a Germanic influence, i.e., Wagner.
« Notre tête est ronde pour permettre à la pensée de changer de direction » (Our head is round to allow thoughts to change direction) – Francis Picabia A current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944) was both a composer and an accomplished pianist with an extensive international career. She wrote about 117 art songs, some of which she also wrote the words. She wrote in a very European idiom and
Swedish artist Carl Köhler (1919-2006) has left a body of art in the neo-modernist style that was virtually ignored at the time of his death. His son, Henry, has taken up his father’s legacy and over the past decade has
In his great spate of lieder writing, the last great collection Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) took on was the Italienisches Liederbuch, translated by Heyse and Geibel, the same translators of the Spanisches Liederbuch. This collection of poetry is translations into German
Wolf took up the poetry of Goethe and in his Goethe-Lieder collection, set 51 poems. They came from a variety of poetic sources, including the influential Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96) and the wonderfully named West-östlicher Diwan (1819), as well as
