Chapter 15

THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF THE ARTS

Close ties among the arts occur because artists share a special purpose: the revelation of values. Furthermore, every artist must use some medium, some kind of stuff that can be formed to communicate that revelation (content) about something (subject matter). All artists share some elements of media, and this sharing encourages their interaction. For example, painters, sculptors, and architects use color, line, and texture. Sculptors and architects work with the density of materials. Rhythm is basic to the composer, choreographer, and poet. Words are elemental for the poet, novelist, dramatist, and composer of songs and operas. Images are basic to the painter, filmmaker, videographer, and photographer. Artists constitute a commonwealththey share the same end and similar means.

Appropriation

Artistic  occurs when (1) artists combine their basic medium with the medium of another art or arts but (2) keep their basic medium clearly dominant. For example, music is the basic medium for composers of opera. The staging may include architecture, painting, and sculpture. The language of the drama may include poetry. The dance, so dependent on music, is often incorporated in opera, and sometimes in contemporary opera so are photography and even film. Yet music almost always dominates in opera. We may listen to Beethovens Fidelio or Bizets

Carmen time after time, yet it is hard to imagine anyone reading the  over and over again. Although essential to opera, the drama, along with the staging, rarely dominates the music. Often the librettos by themselves are downright silly. Nevertheless, drama and the other appropriated arts generally enhance the feelings interpreted by the music.

Except for opera, architecture is the art that appropriates the most. Its centering of space makes room for the placement of sculpture, painting, and photography; the reading of poetry; and the performance of drama, music, and dance. The sheer size of architecture tends to make it prevail over any of the incorporated arts, the container prevailing over the contents.

Interpretation

When a work of art takes another work of art as its subject matter, the former is an  of the latter. Thus, Zeffirellis film Romeo and Juliet takes Shakespeares drama for its subject matter. The film interprets the play. It is fascinating to observe how the contentsthe meaningsdiffer because of the different media. We will analyze a few interesting examples. Bring to mind other examples as you read the text.

Film Interprets Literature: Howards End

E. M. Forsters novel Howards End (1910) was made into a remarkable film in 1992 ( and ) by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay. The film stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, who, along with Jhabvala, won an Academy Award. The film was nominated as best picture, and its third Academy Award went to the design direction of Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker.

The team of Merchant-Ivory, producer and director, has become distinguished for period films set in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Part of the reputation won by Merchant-Ivory films is due to their detailed designs. Thus, in a Merchant-Ivory film one expects to see Edwardian costumes meticulously reproduced, period interiors with prints and paintings, authentic architecture, both interior and exterior, and details sumptuously photographed so that the colors are rich and saturated and the atmosphere appropriately reflecting the era just before and after 1900.

All of that is true of the production of Howards End. But the subtlety of the interplay of the arts in the film is intensified because of the subtlety of the interplay of the arts in the novel. Forster wrote his novel in a way that emulates contemporary drama, at least in part. His scenes are dramatically conceived, with characters acting in carefully described settings, speaking in ways that suggest the stage. Moreover, Forsters special interest in music and the role culture in general plays in the lives of his characters makes the novel especially challenging for interpretation by moving images.

The film follows Forsters story faithfully. Three families at the center of the story stand in contrast: the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen; a rich businessman, Henry Wilcox, his frail wife, Ruth, and their superficial, conventional children; and a poor, young, unhappily married bank clerk, Leonard Bast, whom the Schlegel

sisters befriend. Margaret and Helen are idealistic and cultured. The Wilcoxes, except for Ruth, are uncultured snobs. When Ruth dies, Henry proposes to and is accepted by Margaret. Her sister, Helen, who detests Henry, is devastated by this marriage and turns to Leonard Bast. The story becomes a tangle of opposites and, because of the stupidity of Henrys son Charles, turns tragic. In the end, thanks to the moral strength of Margaret, reconciliation becomes possible.

Read the novel first, and then see the film. In one scene early in the novel, some of the protagonists are in Queens Hall in London listening to Beethovens Fifth Symphony. Here is Forsters wonderful description:

It will be generally admitted that Beethovens Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes comeof course, not so as to disturb the others; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the musics flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Frulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is echt Deutsch [pure German]; or like Frulein Mosebachs young man, who can remember nothing but Frulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.

Now that is a passage surely worth recording. But how could you get it into a film unless by a voiceover, an awkward technique in this context? Observe how this scene is portrayed in the film. Also observe in the film the awkward drawn-out scenes of Leonard Bast pursuing Helen in the rain (she inadvertently had taken his umbrella when leaving the concert hall). One keeps wondering why the soaking Leonard does not simply run and catch up with Helen. In the novel, these events

are much more smoothly handled. In such portrayals, written language has the advantage.

Conversely, the film captures something in 1992 that the novel could not have achieved in its own timethe sense of loss for an elegant way of life in the period before World War I. The moving images create nostalgia for a past totally unrecoverable. Nostalgia for that past is, of course, also created by Forsters fine prose, but not with the power of moving images. Coming back to the novel after its interpretation by the film surely makes our participation more complete.

Music Interprets Drama: The Marriage of Figaro

Perhaps in the age of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (17561791), the opera performed a function for literature somewhat equivalent to what the film does today. Operain combining music, drama, sets, and sometimes dancewas held in highest esteem in Europe in the eighteenth century. And despite the increasing competition from film and musical comedy, opera is still performed to large audiences in theaters and larger audiences on television. Among the worlds greatest operas, few are more popular than Mozarts The Marriage of Figaro (1786), written when Mozart was only thirty.

Mozarts opera interprets the French play The Marriage of Figaro (1784), by Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais, a highly successful playwright friendly with Madame Pompadour, mistress of Louis XVI at the time of the American Revolution. Beaumarchais began as an ordinary citizen, bought his way into the aristocracy, survived the French Revolution, went into exile, and later died in France. His plays were the product of, yet comically critical of, the aristocracy. The Marriage of Figaro, written in 1780, was held back by censors as an attack on the government. Eventually produced to great acclaim, it was seditious enough for later commentators to claim that it was an essential ingredient in fomenting the French Revolution of 1789.

Mozart, with Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the libretto, remained generally faithful to the play, although changing some names and the occupations of some

characters. They reduced the opera from Beaumarchaiss five acts to four, although the entire opera is three hours long.

In brief, it is the story of Figaro, servant to Count Almaviva, and his intention of marrying the countesss maid Susanna. The count has given up the feudal tradition, which would have permitted him to sleep with Susanna first, before her husband. However, he regrets his decision because he has fallen in love with Susanna and now tries to seduce her. When his wife, the countess, young and still in love with him, discovers his plans, she throws in with Figaro and Susanna to thwart him. Cherubino, a very young mansung by a female sopranofeels the first stirrings of love and desires both the countess and Susanna in turn. He is a page in the counts employ, and when his intentions are discovered, he is sent into the army. One of the greatest  in the opera is Non pi andrai (From now on, no more gallivanting), which Figaro sings to Cherubino, telling him that his amorous escapades are now over. The nine-page aria is derived from part of a single speech of Beaumarchaiss Figaro:

No more hanging around all day with the girls, no more cream buns and custard tarts, no more charades and blind-mans-bluff; just good soldiers, by God: weatherbeaten and ragged-assed, weighed down with their muskets, right face, left face, forward march.

Mozarts treatment of the speech demonstrates one of the resources of opera as opposed to straight drama. In the drama, it would be very difficult to expand Figaros speech to intensify its emotional content, but in the opera the speech or parts of it can be repeated frequently and with pleasure, since the music that underpins the words is delightful to hear and rehear. Mozarts opera changes the emotional content of the play because it intensifies feelings associated with key moments in the action.

The aria contains a very simple musical figure that has nonetheless great power in the listening. Just as Mozart is able to repeat parts of the dialogue, he is able to repeat notes, passages, and patterns. The pattern repeated most conspicuously is that of the arpeggio, a chord whose notes are played in quick succession instead of simultaneously. The passage of three chords in the key of C expresses a lifting feeling of exuberance (). Mozarts genius was marked by a way of finding the simplest, yet most unexpected, solutions to musical problems. The arpeggio is practiced by almost every student of a musical instrument, yet it is thought of as something appropriate to practice rather than performance. Thus, Mozarts usage comes as a surprise.

The essence of the arpeggio in the eighteenth century was constant repetition, and in using that pattern, Mozart finds yet another way to repeat elements to

ntensify the emotional effects of the music. The listener hears the passage, is captured, yet hardly knows why it is as impressive and as memorable as it is. There are ways of doing similar things in dramarepeating gestures, for examplebut there are very few ways of repeating elements in such close proximity as the arpeggio does without risking boredom.

The plot of the opera, like that of the play, is based on thwarting the plans of the count with the use of disguise and mix-ups. Characters are hidden in bedrooms, thus overhearing conversations they should not hear. They leap from bedroom windows, hide in closets, and generally create a comic confusion. The much older Marcellina and her lawyer, Bartolo, introduce the complication of a breach of promise suit between her and Figaro just as Figaro is about to marry. The count uses it to his advantage while he can, but the difficulty is resolved in a marvelously comic way: Marcellina sees a birthmark on Figaro and realizes he is her son and the son of Bartolo, with whom she had an affair. That finally clears the way for Figaro and Susanna, who, once they have shamed the count into attending to the countess, can marry.

Mozarts musical resources include techniques that cannot easily be duplicated in straight drama. For example, his extended use of duets, quartets, and sextets, in which characters interact and sing together, would be impossible in the original drama. The libretto gave Mozart a chance to have one character sing a passage while another filled in with an aside. Thus, there are moments when one character sings what he thinks others want him to say, while another character sings his or her inner thoughts, specifically designed for the audience to hear. Mozart reveals the duplicity of characters by having them sing one passage publicly while revealing their secret motives privately.

The force of the quartets and the sextets in The Marriage of Figaro is enormous, adding wonderfully to the comic effect that this opera always achieves. Their musical force, in terms of sheer beauty and subtle complexity, is one of the hallmarks of the opera. In the play, it would be impossible to have six characters speaking simultaneously, but with the characters singing, such a situation becomes quite possible.

The resources that Mozart had in orchestration helped him achieve effects that the stage could not produce. The horns, for example, are sometimes used for the purpose of poking fun at the pretentious count, who is a hunter. The discords found in some of the early arias resolve themselves in later arias when the countess smooths them out, as in the opening aria in act 2: Porgi Amor (Pour forth, O Love). The capacity of the music to emulate the emotional condition of the characters is a further resource that permits Mozart to emphasize tension, as when dissonant chords seem to stab the air to reflect the anxiety of the count. Further, the capacity to bring the music quite low (pianissimo) and then contrast it with brilliant loud passages (fortissimo) adds a dimension of feeling that the play can barely even suggest.

Mozarts The Marriage of Figaro also has been successful because of its political message, which is essentially democratic. The opera presents us with a delightful character, Figaro, a barber become a servant, who is level-headed, somewhat innocent of the evil ways of the world, and smart when he needs to be. He loves Susanna, who is much more worldly-wise than he but who is also a thoughtful, intelligent young woman. In contrast, the count is an unsympathetic man who resents the fact that his servant, Figaro, can have what he himself wants but cannot possess. The count is outwitted by his servant and his wife at almost every turn. The countess

is a sympathetic character. She loves her husband, knows he wants to be unfaithful, but plays along with Susanna and Figaro in a scheme involving assignations and disguises in order to shame him into doing the right thing. The audiences of the late 1700s loved the play because they reveled in the amusing way that Figaro manipulates his aristocratic master. Beaumarchaiss play was as clear about this as the opera. Mozarts interpretation of the play (his subject matter) reveals such a breadth and depth of feeling that now the opera is far more appreciated than the play.

Painting Interprets Poetry: The Starry Night

The visual qualities of poetry sometimes inspire or anticipate painting. One interesting example is that of Vincent van Goghs most famous painting, The Starry Night (). Van Gogh was a tormented man whose slide into insanity has been chronicled in letters, biographies, romantic novels, and films. His painting of a tortured night sky is filled with dynamic swirls and rich colors, portraying a night that is intensely threatening. He wrote, Exaggerate the essential and leave the obvious vague.

In 1888 van Gogh wrote to his sister praising the work of Walt Whitman. He assured her that their brother Theo had Whitmans poetry, which was available to him in 1886. He commented on some lines of Whitman that suggested to him under the starlit vault of Heaven a something which after all can only be called Godand eternity in its place above this world. On December 23 (or 24), 1888, van Gogh experienced a mental episode and cut off part of his ear. He was then admitted to a mental hospital, where he reported that he had spent a great deal of time contemplating the night sky and painting a number of canvases, which he described to his brother. Among them was The Starry Night.

Scholars such as Mark Van Doren, Hope B. Werness, and Jean Schwind have noted numerous similarities between Walt Whitman and Vincent van Gogh. They

noted that Whitmans ecstatic verse complements some of the energy of van Goghs painting. The very title of van Goghs painting appears in Leaves of Grass:

A passage from Whitman that Hope Werness sees as closely connected with The Starry Night is also cited by other commentators on Whitman and van Gogh:

Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,

Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,

Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,

Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,

Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,

Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the

diameter of eighty thousand miles,

Speeding with taild meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,

Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,

Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,

Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,

I tread day and night such roads.

I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,

And look at quintillions ripend and look at quintillions green.

(Walt Whitman, 18191892, Leaves of Grass Book III, “Song of Myself.” Project Gutenburg.)

The reference to the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly has been seen as clarifying the portrait of the crescent moon involved in the noon sun in the right upper corner of the painting. In addition, van Gogh may have felt a sympathetic strain in Whitmans poetry and in his character. Whitmans expression, ready in my madness, may have helped van Gogh experience his own mental condition as related to art, not just insanity.

 PERCEPTION KEY Vincent van Goghs The Starry Night and Walt Whitman

1. In what ways do the samples from Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass echo the details or the structure of The Starry Night?

2. Which details in The Starry Night suggest a connection with Whitmans taild meteors and fire-balls?

3. Some critics have felt that the imagery of The Starry Night somehow expresses emotions allied with mental states of high anxiety and possibly mental instability. Why might they feel this way?

4. Don McLean wrote music and lyrics for a song inspired by van Goghs painting. The lyrics and music for Vincent (Starry Starry Night) can be heard on YouTube: Search Don McLean Starry Starry Night. What effect does the addition of music have on your appreciation of van Goghs painting? In what ways does it enrich your understanding of the painting?

5. Try writing your own song or your own poem as an interpretation of van Goghs painting.

Sculpture Interprets Poetry: Apollo and Daphne

The Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE17 CE) has inspired artists even into modern times. His masterpiece, The Metamorphoses, includes a large number of myths that were of interest to his own time and that have inspired readers of all ages. The title implies changes, virtually all kinds of changes imaginable in the natural and divine worlds. The sense that the world of Roman deities intersected with humankind had its Greek counterpart in Homer, whose heroes often had to deal with the interference of the gods in their lives. Ovid inspired Shakespeare in literature, Botticelli in painting, and perhaps most impressively the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (15981680).

Berninis technique as a sculptor was without peer in his era. His purposes were quite different from those of most modern sculptors in that he was not particularly

388

interested in truth to materials. If anything, he was more interested in showing how he could defy his materials and make marble, for example, appear to be flesh in motion.

Apollo and Daphne (16221625) represents a section of The Metamorphoses in which the god Apollo falls in love with the nymph Daphne (). Cupid had previously hit Apollos heart with an arrow to inflame him, while he hit Daphne with an arrow designed to make her reject love entirely. Cupid did this in revenge for Apollos having killed the Python with a bow and arrow. Apollo woos Daphne fruitlessly, she resists, and he attempts to rape her. As she flees from him, she pleads with her father, the river god Peneius, to rescue her, and he turns her into a laurel tree just as Apollo reaches his prey. Here is the moment in Ovid:

The god by grace of hope, the girl, despair,

Still kept their increasing pace until his lips

Breathed at her shoulder; and almost spent,

The girl saw waves of a familiar river,

Her fathers home, and in a trembling voice

Called, Father, if your waters still hold charms

To save your daughter, cover with green earth

This body I wear too well, and as she spoke

A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing

In earth she stood, white thighs embraced by climbing

Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying

In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed

In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green

Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.

389

 EXPERIENCING Berninis Apollo and Daphne and Ovids The Metamorphoses

1. If you had not read Ovids The Metamorphoses, what would you believe to be the subject matter of Berninis Apollo and Daphne? Do you believe it is a less interesting work if you do not know Ovid?

One obvious issue in looking at this sculpture and considering Ovids treatment of Apollo and Daphne is that today very few people will have read Ovid before seeing the sculpture. In the era in which Bernini created the work, he expected it to be seen primarily by well-educated people, and in the seventeenth century, most educated people would have been steeped in Ovid from a young age. Consequently, Bernini worked in a classical tradition that he could easily rely on to inform his audience.

Today that classical tradition is essentially gone. Few people, comparatively, read Roman poets, yet the people who see this sculpture in the Galleria Borghese in Rome respond powerfully to it, even without knowing the story it portrays. Standing before this work, one is immediately struck by its size, eight feet high, with the figures fully life-size. The incredible skill of the sculptor is apparent in the ways in which the fingers of Daphne are becoming the leaves of the plant that now bears her nameshe is metamorphosing before our eyes, even if we do not know the reference to Ovids The Metamorphoses. The question aesthetically is how much difference does our knowledge of the source text for the sculpture make for our responses to and participation with the sculpture? The interesting thing about knowledge is that once one has it, one cannot unhave it. Is it possible to set apart enough of our knowledge of Ovid to look at the sculpture the way we might look at a sculpture by Henry Moore or David Smith? Without knowledge of Ovid, one would see figures in action impressively represented in marble, mixed with important but perhaps baffling vegetation. Visitors to the sculpture seem genuinely awed by its brilliance, and just being told that it portrays a moment in Ovid hardly alters their response to the work. Only when they read Ovid and reflect on the relationship of text to sculpture do they find their responses altered.

2. What does Bernini add to your responses to Ovids poetry? What is the value of a sculptural representation of a poetic action? What are the benefits to your appreciation of either Bernini or Ovid?

3. Berninis sculpture is famous for its virtuoso perfection of carving. Yet in this work, truth to materials is largely bypassed. Does that fact diminish the effectiveness of the work?

Ovid portrays the moment of metamorphosis as a moment of drowsiness as Daphne becomes rooted and sprouts leaves. It is this instant that Bernini has chosen, an instant during which we can see the normal human form of Apollo, while Daphnes thighs are almost enclosed in bark, her hair and hands growing leaves. The details of this sculpture, whose figures are life-size, are extraordinary. In the Galleria Borghese in Rome, one can walk around the sculpture and examine it up close. The moment of change is so astonishingly wrought, one virtually forgets that it is a sculpture. Bernini has converted the poem into a moment of drama through the medium of sculpture.

Certainly Berninis sculpture is an illustration of a specific moment in The Metamorphoses, but it goes beyond illustration. Bernini has brought the moment

90

into a three-dimensional space, with the illusion of the wind blowing Apollos garments and with the pattern of swooping lines producing a sense of motion. From almost any angle, this is an arresting interpretation, even for those who do not recognize the reference to Ovid.

Drama Interprets Painting

One of the remarkable connections in the arts is the musical theater piece Sunday in the Park with George (1984) (), the Pulitzer Prizewinning play that interpreted George Seurats (18591891) painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte (1884).

The theater interpretation centered on an imaginative biography of Seurat, who was famous for his pointilistic painting style, in which he painted using tiny points of paint that the eye merges so as to perceive an image of people, animals, and things. Seurats figures in the painting are quite static, posed as if waiting to be photographed. He said he had in mind a Greek bas-relief in the Parthenon that showed a procession of ordinary Greek citizens. At the time he painted the picture, he was known for his general democratic ideals. The island of the Grande Jatte was a favorite place for Parisians to hang out in the warm weather. It was where people of many stations of life would socialize. The theater interpretation ends each act with a tableau vivant that re-creates the painting.

The first act of the play is set in 1884 Paris, with Jake Gyllenhaal portraying Seurat in a vain effort to save his love for Dot, his mistress. But she rejects him because she feels they do not belong together. The second act is set in 1984or the presentin which Gyllenhaal plays Seurats grandson and Ashford plays his grandmother. Modern critics have seen the play as a commentary on the democracy of the modern world.

391

 FOCUS ON Photography Interprets Fiction

Although a great many classic paintings were stimulated by narratives, such as Bible stories, Homeric epics, and Ovidian romances, the modern tradition of visual art interpreting fiction has been limited to illustration. Illustrations in novels usually provided visual information to help the reader imagine what the characters look like and what the setting of the novel contributes to the experience of reading. The traditional novelist usually provided plenty of description to help the reader. However, in recent years the profusion of cinema and television interpretations of novels, both historical and contemporary, has led writers to provide fewer descriptive passages to help the reader visualize the scenes. The cinema and television images have substituted for the traditional illustrations because people know what England, France, Ireland, Asia, and Africa look like, and the actors playing the roles of Heathcliff, Anne Elliot, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, and many more have provided indelible images that make book illustration superfluous.

Jeff Wall, a Canadian photographer, is known for his careful preparation of the scenes that he photographs. For example, he spent almost two years putting together the materials for his photograph of After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (). Ralph Ellisons novel Invisible Man (1952) concerns a character known only as the invisible man. The invisible man is a young African American who realizes, in the 1940s, that he is invisible to the general American public. He explains in the prologue to his story that after beating a white man who insulted him, he relents, realizing that the man probably never even saw him. As an African American, he realizes that he has no status in the community, no real place in his own country because of the power of racism. Ellisons novel, widely considered the best American novel of the mid-twentieth century, exposes the depth of racism and how it distorts those who are its victims.

Jeff Wall concentrates on a single moment in the bookin the prologue, in which the invisible man explains how he has tried to make himself visible to his community.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of ones form is to live a death. I myself after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. Ive wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. Ive already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

392

Jeff Wall has done what the invisible man has done. He has installed 1,369 filament lights in the space he has constructed to replicate the basement that the invisible man refers to as his hole. It is his safe place, where he can go to write down the story that is the novel Invisible Man. Critics at the Museum of Modern Art contend that Wall has completely rewritten the rules for illustrating fiction by his efforts at making us come close to feeling what the invisible mans lighted place means to him. Illustrators usually select moments and aspects of the fictions description, but Wall tries to include everything in the basement, even beyond the texts detail. Photography is celebrated often for its ability to document reality; Wall uses photography to document unreality, the only partly described basement room. In this sense, the photograph is hyper-real and thereby reveals the values in the novel in a new way.

 PERCEPTION KEY Photography Interprets Fiction

1. The Museum of Modern Art says that Walls approach to illustrating fiction essentially reinvents the entire idea of illustration. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Could the same be said of Sunday in the Park with George?

2. Walls photograph does not have all the bulbs lighted. In fact, he has chosen to light only some of the bulbs in order to improve the lighting for his photograph. Is that decision a defect in his effort to interpret the novel, or is it the very thing that makes his interpretation more dramatic and more likely to produce a response in the viewer? Comment on the formal qualities of the photograph, the organization of visual elements, the control of color, the position of the figure of the invisible man. How strong is this photograph?

3. After reading Invisible Man (if you have the opportunity), what do you feel the photograph adds to your understanding of Ellisons character and his situation?

Architecture Interprets Dance: National Nederlanden Building

In what may be one of the most extraordinary interactions between the arts, the celebrated National Nederlanden Building in Prague, Czech Republic, by the modernist architect Frank Gehry, seems to have almost replicated a duet between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The building in Prague has been called Ginger and Fred since it was finished in 1996 (). It has also been called the dancing building, but everyone who has commented on the structure points to its rhythms, particularly the windows, which are on different levels throughout the exterior. The building definitely reflects the postures of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire as they appeared in nine extraordinary films from 1933 to 1939 (). Gehry is known for taking considerable chances in the design of buildings (such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; see  to ). The result of his effort in generally staid Prague has been a controversial success largely because of its connection with Rogers and Astaires image as dancers.

Painting Interprets Dance and Music: The Dance and Music

Henri Matisse (18691954) was commissioned to paint The Dance and Music (both 1910) by Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy Russian businessman in Moscow who had

been a longtime patron. The works were murals for a monumental staircase and, since the Russian Revolution of 1917, have been at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. In Matisses time, Shchukin entertained lavishly, and his guests were sophisticated, well-traveled, beautifully clothed patrons of the arts who went regularly to the ballet, opera, and lavish orchestral concerts. Matisse made his work stand in stark contrast to the aristocratic world of his potential viewers.

According to Matisse, The Dance () was derived originally from observation of local men and women dancing on the beach in a fishing village in southern France, where Matisse lived for a short time. Their sardana was a stylized and staid traditional circle dance, but in the Matisse the energy and joy are wild. The Dance interprets the idea of dance rather than any particular dance. Moreover, it is clear that Matisse reaches into the earliest history of dance, portraying naked women and a man dancing with abandon on a green mound against a dark blue sky. Their sense of movement is implied in the gesture of each leg, the posture of each figure, and the instability of pose. The figures have been described as primitive, but their hairdos suggest that they might be contemporary dancers returning to nature and dancing in accord with an instinctual sense of motion.

Music is similarly primitive, with a fiddler and a pipes player (who look as if they were borrowed from a Picasso painting) and three singers sitting on a mound of earth against a dark blue sky (). They are painted in the same flat reddish tones as the dancers, and it seems as if they are playing and singing the music that the dancers are themselves hearing. Again, the approach to the art of music is as basic as the approach to the art of dance, except that a violin, of course, would not exist in a primitive society. The violin represents the strings, and the pipes represent the woodwinds of the modern orchestra, whereas the other musicians use the most basic of instruments, the human voice. The figures are placed linearly, as if they were notes on a staff, a musical phrase with three rising tones and one falling

394

tone (perhaps C A B C G). Music is interpreted as belonging to a later period than that of the dance.

The two panels, The Dance and Music, seem designed to work together to imply an ideal for each art. Instead of interpreting a specific artistic moment, Matisse appears to be striving to interpret the essential nature of both arts.

395

 PERCEPTION KEY Painting and the Interpretation of The Dance and Music

1. Must these paintingswhich are close in sizebe hung near each other for both to achieve their complete effect? If they are hung next to each other, do their titles need to be evident for the viewer to respond fully to them?

2. What qualities of The Dance make you feel that kinetic motion is somehow present in the painting? What is dancelike here?

3. What does Matisse do to make Music somehow congruent with our ideas of music? Which shapes within the painting most suggest music?

4. Suppose the figures and the setting were painted more realistically. How would that stylistic change affect our perception of the essential nature of dance and music?

5. Does participating with these paintings and reflecting on their achievement help you understand and, in turn, enjoy dance and music?

It is fitting to close this chapter with questions arising from a film and an opera that take as their subject matter the same source: Thomas Manns famous short story Death in Venice, published in 1911. Luchino Viscontis 1971 film interprets the story in one way; Benjamin Brittens 1973 opera interprets the story in a significantly different way. Both, however, are faithful to the story. The difference in media has much to do with why the two interpretations of Manns story are so different despite their basically common subject matter.

 

 EXPERIENCING Death in Venice: Three Versions

Read Thomas Manns Death in Venice. This is a haunting taleone of the greatest short stories of the twentieth centuryof a very disciplined, famous writer who, in his fifties, is physically and mentally exhausted. Gustav von Aschenbach seeks rest by means of a vacation, eventually going to Venice. On the beach there, he becomes obsessed with the beauty of a boy. Despite Aschenbachs knowledge of a spreading epidemic of cholera, he remains, and being afraid the boy will be taken away, withholds information about the epidemic from the boys mother. Casting aside restraint and shame, Aschenbach even attempts, with the help of a barber, to appear youthful again. Yet Aschenbach, a master of language, never speaks to the boy, nor can he find words to articulate the origins of his obsession and love. Collapsing in his chair with a heart attack, he dies as he watches the boy walking off into the sea. Try to see Viscontis film, starring Dirk Bogarde. And listen to Brittens opera with the libretto by Myfanwy Piper, as recorded by London Records, New York City, and starring Peter Pears.

1. Which of these three versions do you find most interesting? Why?

2. Does the film reveal insights about Aschenbach (and ourselves) that are missed in the short story? Does the opera reveal insights that escape both the short story and the film? Be specific. What are the special powers and limitations of these three media?

3. In both the short story and the opera, the opening scene has Aschenbach walking by a cemetery in a suburb of Munich. The film opens, however, with shots of

aschenbach entering Venice in a gondola. Why do you think Visconti did not use Manns opening? Why, on the other hand, did Britten use Manns opening?

4. In the opera, unlike the film, the dance plays a major role. Why?

5. The hold of a boy over a mature, sophisticated man such as Aschenbach may seem at first highly improbable and contrived. How does Mann make this improbability seem plausible? Visconti? Britten?

6. Is Britten able to articulate the hidden deeper feelings of Aschenbach more vividly than Mann or Visconti? If so, how? What can music do that these other two media cannot do in this respect? Note Aschenbachs thought in the novella: Language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense. Note also that Visconti often uses the music of Gustav Mahler to help give us insight into the depths of Aschenbachs character. Does this music, as it meshes with the moving images, do so as effectively as Brittens music?

7. Do these three works complement one another? After seeing the film or listening to the opera, does the short story become richer for you? If so, explain.

8. In the short story, Socrates tells Phaedrus, For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone, is lovely and visible at once. For, mark you, it is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses, or bear so to perceive. But in the opera, Socrates asks, Does beauty lead to wisdom, Phaedrus? Socrates answers his own question: Yes, but through the senses . . . and senses lead to passion . . . and passion to the abyss. Why do you think Britten made such a drastic change in emphasis?

9. What insights into our lives are brought to us by these works? For example, do you have a better understanding of the tragedy of beauty and of the connection between beauty and death? Again, do we have an archetype?

Summary

The arts closely interrelate because artists have the same purpose: the revelation of values. They also must use some medium that can be formed to communicate that revelation, and all artists use some elements of media. Furthermore, in the forming of their media, artists use the same principles of composition. Thus, interaction among the arts is easily accomplished. The arts mix in many ways. Appropriation occurs when an artist combines his or her medium with the medium of another art or arts but keeps the basic medium clearly dominant. Interpretation occurs when an artist uses another work of art as the subject matter. Artists constitute a commonwealthsharing the same end and using similar means.

 

Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, trans. Bernard Sahlins. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), p. 29.

Werness, Hope B. Whitman and Van Gogh: Starry Nights and Other Similarities. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 2 (Spring 1985), 35-41.