Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), a composer, painter, writer, and photographer. During his short creative career, he composed over three hundred music compositions, including two major Symphonic Poems, De Profundis (cantata for chorus and orchestra), a string quartet, numerous works for chorus a cappella, compositions for organ, two sonatas, variation cycles, and numerous small scale compositions for piano. In addition, M.K.Čiurlionis also created some four hundred paintings, etchings and sketches, and wrote several literary compositions, both in prose and verse as well as several essays on music and art.
Born in a family of a church organist, he played piano from the age of four, by seven could read music fluently, and often substituted his father at the organ in church at the age eleven. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory between 1894-1899, following with composition and counterpoint studies at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1901-1902. While in Leipzig, his interested in painting took a stringer hold on him, and from 1903 he equally devided his creative energies between music and painting, enroling to Warsaw School for Fine Arts in 1904. In Autumn of 1907 he settled in Vilnius, deciding to devote his future efforts to the cause of Lithuanian culture and statehood. The same year he actively participated in organizing the First Lithuanian Art Exhibition where 33 of his works were shown, conducted the choir of the society Vilniaus Kankles, the first officially sanctioned organization devoted to Lithuanian music, and became involved in plans to create a centre of Lithuanian culture in Vilnius. His trips to St.Petersburg in 1908 and 1909 guaranted first international recognition for his paintings, however, exhaustion led to his mental colapse, and Čiurlionis died of pneumonia in April 1911.
Čiurlionis’ musical language, openly romantic in his early works, became highly personal in his mature compositions. In these works, by employing tonally ambiguous harmonies and sudden drifts through distant keys, he stretched the limits of major-minor tonal boundaries. Several works by Čiurlionis were based on artificial modes, or tonally unrelated harmonic complexes. Indeed, several variation cycles, based on strict melodic rows that are constantly present on various textural and constructive levels, are cited by musicologists as unique examples of tonal dodecaphony. These innovative works preceded the famous compositional technique of Schoenberg by more then a decade.
On the international stage the fame of Čiurlionis rests primarily on his paintings. In Europe and in Japan, where his art is especially highly esteemed, he is considered one of the first abstract artists, a dreamer with his very personal and unique vision of the surrounding world and universe, as well as one who was able through his art to penetrate into deepest and most sacred corners of human soul. While his early symbolist paintings were quite literal in the manner in which they treated symbolic signs, his later paintings became much more sophisticated, portraying complex worlds of colour and line. They frequently possessed musical titles (Sonata, Prelude and Fugue) and, significantly, were based on musical compositional principles.
Rokas Zubovas
| Year of birth | 1875 |
| Year of death | 1911 |
| Nationality | Lithuania |
| Period | Early 20th century |