Comparisons between music, painting and sculpture have never quite rung true for me because you’re talking about fundamentally opposed ideas of what the experience of art is all about. A painting can be experienced in a second’s contemplation or an hour’s, but a piece of music, be it symphony or sonata, has to be journeyed through for just as long as the performance lasts.
And yet, the week the James McNeill Whistler exhibition opens at the Tate in London (here’s Jonathan Jones’s five-star review), I’m having to reconsider. Whistler was profoundly influenced by music, a connection that goes so deep that the results aren’t only aesthetic but visceral, in the fabric of the form and expression of his pictures and his philosophy of painting.
Whistler titled his pictures using the abstract conventions of music. Arrangement in Grey and White No 1, a painting of his mother; Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, a picture of his mistress Joanna Hiffernan; or Harmony in Grey and Green, a portrait of Miss Cicely Alexander. And above all, there is the series of Nocturnes, most especially of the Thames at twilight, taking the title from Chopin’s Nocturnes and the whole history of musical nocturnalia that Susan Tomes’s new book describes.
As Whistler said in 1875, “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour … Why should I not call my works ‘symphonies’, ‘arrangements’, ‘harmonies’, and ‘nocturnes’? … I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself ‘eccentric’…. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, [standing] apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell … Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like”.
Music, and in particular instrumental music, with what Whistler thought of as its art-for-art’s-sake abstraction, offered a foundation for his own way of thinking about painting, a radicalism that makes Jones ask “was Whistler the first absolute modernist?”
But what’s wonderful about this chain of connection across the arts is that what begins as an inspiration from music becomes in turn an inspiration for music, and for one composer in particular: Claude Debussy. Debussy’s Three Nocturnes for orchestra, completed in 1899, aren’t composed in a musical tradition of nocturne-making. Instead, the title is indebted to Whistler’s Nocturnes. As Debussy said, his Nocturnes are about “the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests”, which is exactly what Whistler’s Nocturnes are about too, plays of light in blue and silver; the Thames turned into dreamlike silk.
And there’s more to bind image to sound: two of Whistler’s Nocturnes in the Tate show put time on the canvas. His Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge and Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Fire Wheel take a freeze-frame of fireworks and turn their evanescence into painted permanence in a way that no other technology of the time could do. You could describe them as: “vibrating, dancing rhythms of the atmosphere … sudden flashes of light … a dazzling, fantastic vision of luminous dust participating in … cosmic rhythm”. But in fact, that’s Debussy talking about the second of his orchestral Nocturnes, Fêtes (“Festivals”).
Even more than mutual inspiration, what Debussy and Whistler share is something fundamental: the idea that their compositions aren’t “about” any one thing, but it are a play of sonic and colouristic forms that gave audiences a new kind of physical and expressive sensation. Inspired by music, Whistler’s painting becomes visionary and abstract; inspired by painting, Debussy’s music turns sound into colour, space, and flashes of light.
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Felicity Lott’s life in music was one of the treasures of our time. Happily for us there remain many recordings where we can watch and listen to her light up the stage with her gleaming soprano and luminous presence. Watch her as the Marschallin with the conductor Carlos Kleiber in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and be transported to a world of aching nostalgia and searing emotional honesty.
Several decades ago, as a Boulez-obsessed teenager, I was enough of a snob to imagine that Strauss’s Four Last Songs were a decorative indulgence, an over-romantic opiate for those who really ought to know better. I was, in other words, a total idiot. Hearing Lott sing the work at the Usher Hall during 1992’s Edinburgh festival with Klaus Tennstedt conducting the London Philharmonic was an epiphany. (And here is the very performance, even more radiant than I remember!) I was taught a lesson in the power of music’s many lines of beauty to say more and mean more than any narrow ideologies of modernism.
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This week Tom has been listening to: inspired by moving accounts of the 98-year-old Herbert Blomstedt’s courage in conducting Mahler’s Ninth with the San Francisco Symphony, I’ve been listening to his live recording with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra from 2019, made when he was a mere 92. It’s easy to get carried away with “cuddly-elder-statesman-still-conducting!” vibes when thinking about Blomstedt, but what’s amazing about this Mahler Nine is its forensic musical clarity and expressive honesty. Blomstedt is never histrionic or superficially daring in his approach, but he implacably reveals Mahler’s score, and makes its screams the more shattering in the first movement, its parodies more cutting in the third, and its consolations on the edge of existence in the final movement still more breathtaking. Listen on Spotify.
