“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.
Although he set the great poets such as Goethe, Beethoven set one poem by a German writer who was better known for his plays. In music, many of those plays were the basis for great operas: Wilhelm Tell became Rossini’s
When we think of Beethoven (1770-1827), we think of his orchestral music – great symphonies that brought a century-old genre forward. By the end, it wasn’t enough to have a large orchestra, he also had to have a chorus as
Franz Grillparzer, Ignaz Castelli, and Eduard von Bauernfeld were all friends of Schubert and appear in the 1868 ‘Schubertiade’ drawing done by Moritz von Schwind, where they are standing behind the women on the right side of the picture.
“One day I must be able to improvise freely on the keyboard of colors: the row of watercolors in my paintbox” Paul Klee (1879-1940), son of a German music teacher and a Swiss mother, started studying violin as a child,
We’ve looked at Schubert’s song cycles, but that was only a small part of the enormous number of lieder he wrote. There were many other poets he set than just the majors we are so familiar with (Goethe, Schiller, and
When we think of Marc Chagall and opera, we think first of the wonderful murals he created for the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Paris Opera. Born in Russia in 1887, Chagall was largely self-taught due to the
We mentioned the collection Schwanengesang in our last Schubert article. The collection was put together posthumously by Schubert’s publisher without regard to Schubert’s usual practice or Schubert’s probable wishes. Schubert never mixed his poets and also had a firm regard
