Author’s Note: This is one in a series of articles exploring the relationship between art and music. Please proceed to the end of the story and click on the musical selection, to enjoy while reading the piece.

Is it always midnight in Paris? You may recall Woody Allen’s recent film of the same name, a nocturnal fantasy set in the rain-soaked cobblestone streets, elegant restaurants and smoke-filled cafes of this 1920s ‘City of Light.’ Here, the movie’s time traveler fulfills what we all fantasize at times: to go back in time and engage the giants of art and literary circles in casual conversation—while drinking whiskey with Hemingway under the blue awnings at Les Deux Magots or dining with Picasso and friends at a crowded Montparnasse bistro. artes fine arts magazine

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” In the decades since Hemingway recalled his time as a young man in Paris with these immortal words, the world has become much flatter. And the opportunity to experience the creative forces that propelled a generation of artists, writers and musicians to challenge outdated notions of creativity, has moved to other shores.

Just such an opportunity to appreciate the nexus between early modern art and music occurred at a recent concert entitled, Picasso and the Music of Prokofiev, at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, CT. There, the collection of Picasso paintings served as inspiration for members of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, playing as a small ensemble, to evoke the spirit of a time when Picasso and great composers of the early 20th century, alike, were pushing the rules of composition to their limits. As great works by Picasso ‘looked on,’ in the museum’s voluminous 1920s, Bauhaus-era Avery Court, the spirit of his daring imagery came to life through the sounds of his contemporaries and friends: Igor Stravinsky, Manuel De Falla, and Sergi Prokofiev, along with the contemporaneous chamber work of Erwin Schulhoff.

The soundscape of this performance extended far beyond the city limits of 1920s Paris, however. The selections offered the musical portrait of an artist whose first love was always his native Spain—and whose influence was already being felt in other parts of Europe and America. Picasso was an artist whose paintings and drawings were deeply rooted in his provincial homeland, and in the strong emotions that were an inexorable part of his Spanish personality. But fate and politics caused him to devote many decades of his time and attention to the culture of Paris, and its people. A scrupulous observer of human nature, Picasso was capable of capturing, in a few well-placed strokes of pencil or brush, the essence of his subject—be it a local street waif, beautiful woman, or great musician.

The program selection of the Atheneum performance captured the egalitarian nature of creative expression in the days of early Modernism. Until then, the formal French academies of art and their effete exhibition committees had maintained a firm grasp on artistic output. The twentieth-century art world, however, turned its back on that past, attending instead to the ordinary and commonplace, subject matter considered out-of-bounds for a respectable tradition-bound artist. As such, visual art was inspired by the immediate realities of city life, just as composers were looking to folk tunes, local cross-cultural liturgical music, popular ballads and tales—along with their regionalized structure of key and rhythm—to evoke the spirit or sense of the very countryside which inspired it. The challenge was to interpret these time-honored influences in an atonal or non-syncopated compositional style that embraced evolving modern stylistic idioms. Musical composition in the 1920s became the aural equivalent of Cubism and Expressionism, with edgy coloration and tonal experimentation taking precedence over foot-tapping tempo and melody.

The museum’s four chamber works performance was not so much a literal explication of the Picasso paintings in their collection, as an interpretive statement about the shared experience of a then rapidly-changing modern world, and how best to memorialize it. In the years surrounding the First World War, rural cultures were coming unraveled—either through armed conflict, or massive migration from the countryside to cities, in search of jobs in the growing number of mills and factories springing up there. And with these changes, traditions and the oral history of local folklore were rapidly disassembling. Political bickering was threatening national borders, and along with it, national and individual identity.

The most poignant example of the implication of this threat was composer, Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), a Jewish-Czech, whose Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass was inspired by a visit in 1924 to a Slavic folk festival, where “farmers’ sons and daughters sang and danced incessantly a thousand years of tradition.” He also alluded to “Russian-orthodox litany” and influences of Czech folk dance melodies in the opening movement of his piece. Schulhoff later fled the encroaching influence of the Nazis in the 1930s, only to die in a Czech concentration camp while attempting to complete his Eighth Symphony. Poignant, yet impassioned and optimistic, it was difficult to hear this performance as anything other than a eulogy for its composer, knowing how his life and potential were so cruelly cut short.

Manuel De Falla (1876-1946) was Spain’s foremost 20th century composer. He moved from Spain to France between 1907-1914, where he befriended Debussy, Ravel and Dukas. After returning to Spain, he was reluctant to turn out Spanish program music, a trend adopted by non-Spanish composers of the time. Instead, he was influenced by the Russian, Stravinsky, to produce compositions that were tonally austere and concise. In 1926, he composed, Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments. Heard in the midst of the Atheneum’s Picasso collection, it provided a beautiful, multisensory image of the Spanish terrior. One critic called the worked performed in recognition of the museum’s Picasso holdings, “…the most beautiful, and the most Spanish of all De Falla’s musical utterances, the impression of vastness—as though one were in the interior of some great cathedral…is truly overwhelming.” The event program notes of this Harpsichord Concerto, “Never has the eternal essence of Spain been so nakedly embodied in music. It is Manuel De Falla’s masterpiece.”

The next work, a brief homage to Picasso himself, ended just thirty-seconds after it began. This miniature clarinet piece was composed on an impromptu basis, scribbled on an Italian telegram form by an inebriated Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), as he and a friend sat in a café in Rome, in April, 1917. The original document, Pour Pablo Picasso, still exists, a copy of which served as the sheet music for the clarinetist at the performance. Stravinsky’s friend, Robert Craft, later recalled the moment when the piece was dashed out: “…the composer was alcoholically elevated at the time, since the lines of the staff weave uncharacteristically, and the name ‘Pablo’ is misspelled as ‘Paolo,’ and the Italian word for April is also incorrect. The music betrays no sign of inebriation, however, and the Spanish character of the embellished six-pitch melody is established in only 23 notes.” Plaintive and museful, it is a brief reflection on the inner psyche of the man whose quiet genius single-handedly reshaped the world of art for all time.

Last on the program was Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet, Op 39, in G minor (1924). Prokofiev (1891-1953) lived in Paris at the time of its commissioning by Boris Romanov, a dancer and choreographer in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. Intended to be a ballet entitled, “Trapeze,” the work succeeds as pure chamber music. Though not meant to be program music, the piece nevertheless evokes images of a 20th century city in the throes of cultural revolution. The deep resonance of the double bass becomes the voice of the eternal city of Paris, solid and resolute in its timelessness; while both violin and viola alternately project moods of quiet, harmonic contemplation and frenzied discordance, reflecting the tumult and intensity of urban living. Clarinet and oboe return, again and again in the 22-minute performance, their high pitches intoning a naive, curious, yet tremulous presence in the somber uncertainty of a modern world—together becoming a musical postcard from Jazz Age Paris, in the Twenties.

We did not run into Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at this elegant event. Nor did I get any writing advice from a laconic Hemingway, attempting to persuade me to read his latest rough draft of “A Moveable Feast.” Salvador Dalí was present, but only in the form of several of his works hanging near Picasso’s. The demeanor of the enormously talented ensemble of musicians and members of the sold-out audience bore little resemblance to the expatriates and bohemians who treated Paris as their refuge during the vibrant, contentious 1920s. For a brief time on a winter’s Sunday afternoon, though, Hartford served to create the center of their artistic universe. And, during those few hours, those legends of art and music all converged in the room, allowing us to feast on the sights and sounds of their collective legacy.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Listen to Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet, Opus 39, in G minor, to be spirited back to Picasso’s Paris in the 1920s, while reading the article:

Other articles in the ARTES series exploring the relationship between art and music:

Picasso and Guitar Motif: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2011/10/one-in-series-of-articles-exploring-relationship-between-art-music/

Mussorgsky’s Tribute: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2013/08/14007/

African-American Artist, Romare Bearden and Jazz Influence: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2012/02/romare-bearden-and-the-prevalence-of-ritual-an-eloquent-voice-in-african-american-art/

Last Surviving Member of Ellington Band- When Black is Gray: http://herbertjeffries.weebly.com/