The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Marsha L. Morton and Peter L. Schmunk. (Critical and Cultural Musicology, 2.) New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. [viii, 239 p. ISBN 0-8153-3156-8. $65.]

Such attributes as color, harmony, line, texture, and intensity are routinely discerned in music and painting alike; indeed, everyday parlance accepts without question that sharing of terms. Yet underneath this practice lie diverse conceptions of how music and painting are related, and in the nineteenth century especially, this topic drew much attention. Moreover, the discussions necessarily entailed opinions as to the very nature of music and of painting. In The Arts Entwined, nine historically grounded essays approach these vexed issues from many different angles.

The first chapter, by editor Marsha L. Morton, provides a fine introduction as it traces a shift in music's position in the family of the arts. From its humble status in the eighteenth century--just a means of communicating "mere sensations without concepts" (p. 3, quoting Immanuel Kant)--it ascends to a position of supremacy over its sisters. Morton enlists the words of philosophers, writers, critics, composers, and artists as she documents this change. She also broaches other subjects of continuing importance in the volume: the unification of the arts, synesthesia, Gesamtkunstwerk, program music versus absolute music, landscape as inspiration and as genre, and the growth of abstraction in painting. Philippe Junod's essay (chap. 2) supplements Morton's survey while systematically explicating the tensions and conflicts that arose in nineteenth-century aesthetic developments --"the paradoxes and contradictions of pictorial musicalism," as Junod's subtitle states it. For instance, he identifies a major strain between the tendency to blur the boundaries between the arts and the growing awareness of the "peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm" belonging to each art (p. 32, quoting Walter Pater).

The seven remaining essays are more individualized case studies, but in several respects they display qualities found in the initial chapters. Besides maintaining a meticulous specificity of argument and citation, the additional chapters show a common recognition of whose influence to honor: they tend to quote such notables as Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, and Richard Wagner. Then, too, the themes of chapters 1 and 2 emerge again and again, and as a result, the later essays attain an attractive interdependence. Finally, the chronological placement of the last seven essays is neatly spread through the century; setting out from Goethe's thoughts and activities, we arrive six chapters later at the artwork of Edvard Munch.

Stephanie Campbell's "Seeing Music" (chap. 3) appraises the friendly exchanges of ideas between two essentially eighteenth-century figures, Goethe (1749-1832) and his trusted musical collaborator, Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832). The propriety of tone painting as understood around 1800 is the point at issue. Campbell further investigates Zelter's own compositions for signs of tone painting. (Touches of biographical information here introduce a subject area that the succeeding essays skillfully exploit.) In chapter 6, Carlo Caballero sets out the genesis and probes the meaning of Camille Saint-Saëns's symphonic poem Le rouet d'Omphale. The contrast between this work's intention and that of Franz Liszt's symphonic poems is clearly established, while Caballero studies what the Saint-Saëns piece tells its audience in light not only of the mythological sources but also of contemporaneous paintings that depict Hercules and Omphale together. More might have been said about Saint-Saëns's tone poem as a member of the rhythmically defined spinning-music subgenre, whose locus classicus is the Goethe-Schubert "Gretchen am Spinnrade."

The most elaborate discussion of a composition's extramusical meaning occurs in Thomas H. Grey's study of Felix Mendelssohn's Hebrides (chap. 4). With considerable scholarly panache, Grey moves from events in the composer's life through closely focused technical-musical observations, and then on to possible literary, pictorial, operatic, and orchestral connections linking the overture to the...