Talking Pictures, Sounding Sense

Literature, Poetry and Music in Art

Date/time:
24 April - 22 May 2012
Tuesdays 10.45am - 12.45pm
Venue:
1 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DJ
Lecturer:
Graham Fawcett
Fees:
Full course (5 lectures) £175.00
Single lecture £40.00
(Includes morning coffee, biscuits and refreshments)

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“It’s been absolutely fascinating and I’ve loved every lecture”

When narrative in literature and poetry has the capacity to inspire the eye and ear with equal force, composers and painters alike are found rushing to re-deliver that impact in the language of paint and music. This is how it looks, they say, or, this is how it sounds; and what they say suggests that music and art created from the same poem or story can often reward our attention to both of them at once. Talking Pictures, Sounding Sense will offer some striking examples of this from both art and music. Here are five especially memorable moments when painters and composers (sometimes more than one of each) have met like moths round the candle-flame of the same narrative.

Course outline

24
Apr
2012
Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness

Samson’s début is his Bible life-story. Milton’s poem finds him already blind and in prison. Art and music fall upon the shearing, the betrayal, and the demolition, but to do the great inner drama justice too, Mantegna, Rubens and Rembrandt have to balance colour and shadow as Handel and Saint-Saëns do voice against orchestra in this dark tale.

01
May
2012
Can They Do Without Eurydice?

First heard in Virgil and Ovid, Orpheus’s gift for spellbinding, a self-foiled rescue bid, and a dumbfounding death have won him tributes. How big an audience should we see him singing to? Should aural impressions of his voice be unearthly? Monteverdi, Gluck and Milhaud try to capture the ineffable, as do Dürer, Canova, Poussin, and Watts.

08
May
2012
Mother to the Rescue

Compiled in 1835, to rival Homer, from a millennial oral tradition of songs and stories in Karelia, the Kalevala was irresistible to the young Sibelius and the painter Akseli Gallen- Kallela. They recognized a Finnish folk variation on the Pietà theme in the episode when a wild hero’s mother tracks him to the underworld and literally puts him together again.

15
May
2012
Playing at Dare

The poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, dates from c.1375. It was 1991 before Birtwistle’s opera had its premier. The original manuscript’s art-work is beguiling; there are some very fine 15th c calendar illustrations, and a painting by Burne-Jones. And the task of all of them is to witness Camelot’s gate-crashing giant and Gawain’s riveting pilgrimage of endurance and temptation.

22
May
2012
Unveiling the Grail

Like Gawain, the Parsifal story had to wait for its opera moment, Wagner finally taking the bait from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem about that knight’s quest for the Grail. By then, Rossetti, Redon, Burne-Jones and a Bavarian castle’s wall-painters had all pictured Parsifal in the Pyrenean wild, with magic, miracle and healing up ahead.