Classical music and the visual arts have long shared a creative dialogue. Over the centuries, composers have looked beyond the concert hall to art galleries, churches and museums, finding inspiration in paintings, sculptures and architectural masterpieces. A single image can suggest a story, evoke a mood or capture a moment with such power that it seems to demand a musical response. Through melody, harmony and orchestral colour, composers have sought to translate what the eye sees into something the ear can experience. This playlist explores ten outstanding examples of that artistic conversation.
1Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
The death of Viktor Hartmann in 1873, aged only 39, distressed his friend Modest Mussorgsky deeply. When a memorial exhibition of Hartmann’s works opened in St Petersburg the following spring, Mussorgsky resolved to write a descriptive piano suite – black-and-white reproductions, if you will – inspired by ten of Hartmann’s works. From the malevolent Gnomus to the majestic Great Gate of Kiev, Pictures at an Exhibition is a virtuoso example of portraying the visual through music. “My physiognomy,” the composer explained, “can be seen in the intermezzi,” short promenades that link some of the pictures. Several composers orchestrated the suite, most notably Maurice Ravel, but the piano original deploys its own vivid palette of colours.
2Respighi: Three Botticelli Pictures
In many ways, the genius of Mussorgsky’s music surpassed Hartmann’s artworks. In 1927, Ottorino Respighi set his creative sights towards a much more celebrated artist: Sandro Botticelli, one of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance. In Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, he encountered three Botticelli paintings – La Primavera (Spring), The Adoration of the Magi and The Birth of Venus – which inspired him to compose this colourful triptych. In the central panel, listen out for a quotation from the medieval Christmas hymn Veni, veni Emanuel.
3Rachmaninov: The Isle of the Dead
Rachmaninov’s bleak symphonic poem was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead, depicting a figure being rowed across a lake towards a rocky island. The boat lurches unsteadily in 5/8 time, a deathly barcarolle as the oars dig into the water. Listen out for plenty of Dies irae quotations.
4Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress
Stravinsky’s only full-length opera was prompted by seeing an exhibition of William Hogarth prints in Chicago. Their Faustian depiction of the downfall of Tom Rakewell, who squanders his inheritance and ends up in the madhouse, seemed perfect operatic material to Stravinsky, who created an opera drawing on Baroque and Classical styles. Counteracting the satanic alter-ego of Nick Shadow is the steadfast Anne Trulove, devoted to saving Tom’s soul.
5Dutilleux: Timbres, espace, mouvement
Don McLean may have got to Vincent Van Gogh first (Starry, starry night, 1972), but the famous starlit landscape, painted from Dutch Post-Impressionist’s asylum room, was also the inspiration for – and subtitle of – Henri Dutilleux’s Timbres, espace, mouvement (1978), which the composer described as “an attempt at a dialogue between painting and music”. The score contains no violins or violas. Dutilleux explained that “I aimed for a sensation where the listener can ‘see’ with their ears, meaning that the flow of sound is reflected in the mind as visual movement.”
6Hindemith: Mathis der Maler Symphony
In 1934, Paul Hindemith extracted orchestral music from his then unfinished opera Mathis der Maler, about the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, to create his Mathis der Maler Symphony. Each movement relates to a tableau of Grünewald’s masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar: Angelic Concert, inspired by the left half of the Nativity scene; Entombment depicts the sorrowful lamentation on the altarpiece’s predella; The Temptation of St Anthony depicts the right wing of the altarpiece.
7Martinů: The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca
Bohuslav Martinů was particularly struck by the cycle of frescoes by Piero della Francesca, which he saw in the Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo, in 1954, particularly by The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Martinů didn’t attempt to compose programmatic music, but rather to express his feelings from viewing the frescoes. “I tried to express in musical terms that kind of solemnly immobile calm and semi-darkness, that palette of colours creating an atmosphere filled with delicate, peaceful, and moving poetry.”
8Vaughan Williams: Job, a Masque for Dancing
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Job, a Masque for Dancing is a symphonic ballet, first staged by Ninette de Valois, based on the biblical Book of Job. RVW was heavily inspired by William Blake’s series of engravings. Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes turned down the ballet as “too English and too old-fashioned”, which probably did not displease the composer, whose music juxtaposes English pastoral beauty with the aggressive dissonance of Satan.
9Feldman: Rothko Chapel
Rothko Chapel was written to be performed inside what turned out to be Mark Rothko’s final masterpiece: an octagonal chapel in Houston. Like Rothko, Morton Feldman’s score paints on a wide canvas, beginning and ending with the viola, a moment described by the composer as a “quasi-Hebraic melody”. The pace between is slow, with wordless chords from the choir matching the ring of a shimmering vibraphone. "Rothko's imagery goes right to the edge of his canvas, and I wanted the same effect with the music,” Feldman said of his work. “It should permeate the whole octagonal room and not be heard from a certain distance.”
10Liszt: Il penseroso
Franz Liszt’s Il penseroso (from the Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie) is a brooding introspective piano miniature. It was inspired by Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, titled Il Penseroso (The Thoughtful One), housed in the Medici Chapel at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. The music renders the sculpture’s meditative mood as an austere, chromatic soundscape.
