Poulenc, Proust, Pictures, Painters

Composers and paintings. An intertwining that only really gets going in the mid-19^th century with ease of travel, salon-life (particularly in Paris) and, significantly, wealth. So, when Emmanuel Chabrier was composing at his piano, on the wall facing him was Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère (he had a rich wife). And on Delius’ wall was Gaugin’s Nevermore (ditto, dad). And, talking of wealth, I’ll never forget visiting Andrew Lloyd Webber’s country manse and wowing at paintings which I’d only previously seen Blu-tacked to undergraduate walls. These, though, were the real deal…

Composers. Historically, as they travel more, or start to move in more elite circles, they will often fall with alacrity on painters who share their aesthetic. Berlioz in London was poleaxed by John Martin (specifically the Paradise Lost illustrations). ‘At last’, he thinks, ‘an artist as broad and as bonkers as me!’. Debussy named his orchestral Nocturnes after Whistler’s Thames oils. (He knew him from the Mallarmé salon.) Indeed, Whistler’s works themselves borrow a specifically musical title. That’s cross-pollination, aesthetic empathy.

Firstly, on your left, a group of four by Reynaldo Hahn. His Portraits de Peintres. What to say about Hahn? A composer of infinite charm. French, Venezuelan, German, gay. Wrote song masterpieces aged 15 and 16 with the grace of a youngster and the skill of a pro. Music’s Max Dowman. And, for quite a while, Marcel Proust’s boyfriend. Together they wrote a suite for reciter and piano, Marcel’s words, Reynaldo’s music. And the subjects were painters. Cuyp, Paulus Potter, Van Dyck, Watteau.

If Proust had an equal for this painterly promiscuity, it’s the composer Francis Poulenc. Like Hahn, he was an enfant terrible, gay, and a mover in elite salon circles – in his case more demi-monde than belle époque. Poulenc boasted an extraordinary visual memory. He was a gallery-haunter, worldwide, with a prodigious recall of colours and textures, often matching painting to painting – the similarity, say, of the shade of a Zurbarán robe to that of a Bonnard wallpaper. A personal friend (and lover) of many painters, he also had, like many other composers (Scriabin, Amy Beach) ‘chromesthesia,’ the association between visual stimuli and musical keys. For Poulenc, for instance, sunshine was always in D major. From dawn in his ballet Les Animaux modèles to a sun-drenched Sunday, in the song La grenouillère (which invokes eponymous art by Monet and Renoir).

Now to our last room, and something much more up-to-date. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. The title is as geographically specific as Poulenc’s La grenouillère, albeit not quite as far down the Seine. ‘George’ is of course Seurat. And the painting is his Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte, now in Chicago. (I’m reliably informed that some of the millions of dots the painting is made of regularly drop off like dandruff and have to be swept up. Give me a bag of those, please!) Before he wrote a single bar, Sondheim worked out a musical vocabulary based on Seurat’s colour wheel. Each colour was a note, and the resulting tight chords became the underlying harmonic language of the piece.  The Grande Jatte is the painting that comes to life at the end – and in Act One we see him working on it. The stabbing music replicates the pecking motion of a pointillist’s paintbrush. And he sings as he works to the people he is making:

That concludes our tour. Almost. There’s a side-room to show you containing some worthy contenders that didn’t quite make the main rooms. Hindemith’s symphony Mathis der Maler, which not only depicts panels of the Grünewald Isenheim Altarpiece (now in Colmar), but also uses contrasting musical devices (mediaeval modes rubbing shoulders with 30’s atonality) to typify the stylistic breadth of that masterpiece. Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano saves you a trip to an overcrowded Uffizi with a glittering rendition of three Botticelli bangers, Primavera, Adoration of the Magi, and the Birth of Venus. Not just about how they look but how they feel, to Botticelli, to Respighi, and to us.