Pictures in Music

Do you see pictures in music? When you hear a Beethoven symphony or a sonata by Schumann, do mystic human figures and landscape float before your eyes?

It is by no means new or uncommon for a composer to have a distinct picture in his mind when he sets himself to create a work. Schumann saw children at play in an embowered wood, dancing merrily until, lo! the sudden advent of a satyr sent them shrieking to their homes.

Few, however, have been able to delineate their hallucinations born of music. Mendelssohn, who was no means draughtsman, was often asked to do so, but always refused. "It is like asking a sculptor to paint a portrait of his statue," he once said. "All art is one, just as the human body is one, but each of the members has its functions. It is the function of music, to hear, not to see." Nevertheless, it is highly interesting to see music translated in the terms of a sister art, and this is what a clever artist, Miss Pamela Colman Smith, has done, in pictures which are published now for the first time in THE STRAND MAGAZINE.

Many of the compositions selected by the artist will instantly be recognized as conveying, in quite a surprising way, a vivid idea of the music as a whole. Every reader can ascertain for himself whther he possesses this peculiar psychic gift -- this power of conjuring up music pictures. When you next hear a famous sonata, close your eyes and see what, if any, "pictures" pass before the eyes of your brain. Under the magical influence of music, the soul has glimpses of wondrous shapes, lit by the light that never was on sea or land.

"You ask me how these pictures are evolved", said Miss Colman Smith. "They are not pictures of the music theme -- pictures of the flying notes -- not conscious illustrations of the name given to a piece of music, but just what I see when I hear music -- thouhts loosened and set free by the spell of the sound.

"When I take a brush in hand and the music begins, it is like unlocking the door into a beautiful country. These, stretched far away, are plains and mountains and the billowy sea, and as the music forms a net of sound the people who dwell there enter the scene; tall, slow-moving, stately queens, with jewelled crowns and garments gay or sad, who walk on mountain-tops or stand beside the shore, watching the water-people. These water-folk are passionless, and sway or fall with little heed of time; they toss the stray and, bending down, dive headlong through the deep.

"There are the dwellers, too, of the great plain, who sit and brood, made of stone and motionless; the trees, which slumber till some elf goes by with magic spear and wakes the green to life; towers, white and tall, standgin against the darkening sky --

Those tall white towers that one sees afar,
Topping the mountain crests like crowns of snow.
Their silence hangs so heavy in the air
That thoughts are stifled.

"Then huddling crowds, who carry spears, hasten across the changing scene. Sunsets fade from rose to grey, and clouds scud across the sky.

"For a long time the land I saw when hearing Beethoven was unpeopled; hills, plains, ruined towers, churches by the sea. After a time I saw far off a little company of spearman ride away across the plain. But now the clanging sea is strong wiht the salt of the lashing spray and full of elemental life; the riders of the waves, the Queen of Tides, who carries in her hand the pearl-like moon, and bubbles gleaming on the inky wave.

"Often when hearing Bach I hear bells ringing in the sky, rung by whirling cords held in the hands of maidens dressed in brown. There is a rare freshness in the air, like morning on a mountain top, with opal-coloured mists that chase each other fast across the scene.

"Chopin brings night ; gardens where mystery and dread lurk unde every bush, but joy and passion throb with in the air, and the cold moon bewitches all the scene. There is a garden that I often see, with moonlight glistening on the vine-leaves, and drooping roses with pale petals fluttering down, tall, misty trees and purple sky, and lovers wandering there.

"A drawing of the garden I have shown to several people and asked them if they could play the music that I heard when I drew it. They have all, without any hesitation, played the same. I do not know the name, but -- well, I know the music of that place."

It is interesting to compare with these experinces the words of great artists and writers who have been endowed with the same gift.

"When I listen to music," wrote the great Meissonier, "it take shape in my inner soul, it conjures up form and landscapes. For instance, Beethoven's Symphony in A -- my favourite, the one I adore -- alway shows me a Greek landscape smiling in the sunlight, with clear water over which dragon-flies hover, where nymphs bathe hand in hand."

One of the most sensitive of music-lovers was Heine, who tells us that as he listened the world around would dissapear, and in its place strange phantom forms, mystic scenes, and figures born of melody would glide before his rapturous vision. Few things in literature are more impressive than his description of Paganini playing : --

"As for me, you already know my musical second-sight, my gift of seeing at each tone a firgure equivalent to the sound, and so Paganini, with each stroke of the bow, brought visible forms and situations before my eyes ; he told me in melodious hieroglyphics all kinds of briliant tales ; he, as it were, made a magic-lantern play its coloured antics before me, he himself being chief actor. At the first stroke of his bow the stage scenery around him had changed ; he suddenly stood with his music-desk in a cheerful room, decorated in a gay irregular way after the Pompadour style ; everywhere little mirrors, gilded Cupids, Chinese porcelain, a delightful chaos of ribbons, garlands of flowers, white gloves, torn lace, false pearls, diadems of gold leaf and spangles -- such tinsel as one finds in the room of a prima donna. Paganini's outward appearance had also changed, and certainly most advantageously ; he wore short breeches of lily-coloured satin, a white waistcoat embroidered with silver, and a coat of bright blue velvet with gold buttons ; the hair in litte carefully-curled locks bordered his face, which was young and rosy, and gleamed with sweet tenderness as he ogled the pretty young lady who stood near hem at the music-desk whilehe played the violin."

As other times when Paganini began to play a gloom came before the listener's eyes. The sounds were not transformed into brght formes and colours ; the master's form was clothed in gloomy shades, out of the darkeness of which his music moaned in the most piercing tones of lamentation. Only at times, when a little lamp that hung above cast its sorrowful light over him, could Heine catch a glimpse of his pale countenance, on which the youth was not yet extinguished. His costume was singular, in two colours, yellow and red. Heavy chains weighed upon his feet. Behind him moved a face whose physiognomy indicated a lusty goat-nature. And he saw at times long, hairy hands seize assistingly the strings of violin on which Paganini was playing.

"Then a rush of agonizing sounds came from the violin, and a fearful groan, and a sob such as was never heard upon the earth before, nor will perhaps be heard on earth again ; unless in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, when the collosal trumpets of doom shall ring out and the naked corpses shall crawl froth from the grave to abide their fate. But the agonized violinist suddenly made one stroke of the bow, such a mad, despairing stroke that his chains fell rattling from him, and his mysterious assistant and the other foul mocking forms vanished."

Again the master musician and his surrounding scarcely be recognized in the monk's brown dress, which concealed rather than clothed him. With savage countenance half hid by the cowl, waist girt with a cord, and bare feet, Paganini stood, a solitary, defiant figure, on a rocky prominence by the sea, and played his violin. But the sea became red and redder, and the sky grew paler, till at last the surging water looked like a bright scarlet bood, and the sky above became of a ghastly corpse-like colour, and the stars came out large and threatening ; and those stars were black, black as glooming coal. But the tones of the violin grew ever more stormy and defiant, and the eyes of the terrible player sparkled with such a scornful lust of destruction, and his thin lips moved with such a horrible haste, that it seemed as if he murmured some old accursed charms to conjures the storm and loose the evil sprits that lie imprisoned in the abysses of the sea. Often when he stretched his long, thin arms from the broad monk's sleeve, and swept the air with his bow, he seemed like some sorcerer who commands the elements with his magic wand ; and then there was a wild wailing from the depth of the sea, and the horrible waves of blood sprang up so fiercely that they almost besprinled the pale sky and black stars with their red foam. There was a wailing and a shrieking and a crashing as if the world was falling into fragments, and ever more stubbornly the monk played his violin. He seemed as if, by the power of violent will, he wished to break the seven seals wherewith Solomon sealed the iron vessels in which he had shut up those vanquished demons. The wise king sank those vessels in the sea, and Heine seemed to hear the voices of the imprisoned spirits while Paganini's violin growled in its most wrathful bass. But at last he thought he heard the jubilee of deliverance, and out of the red billows of blood emerged the heads of the fettered demons : monsters of legendary horror, crocodiles with bat's wings, snakes with stags' horns, monkeys with shells on their heads, seals with long patriarchal beards, women's faces with breasts in place of cheeks, green camels' heads, hermaphrodites of impossible combination -- all staring with cold, crafty eyes, and with long, fin-like claws grasping at the fiddling monk. From the latter, however, in the furious zeal of his conjuration the cowl fell back, and the curly hair, fluttering in the wind, fell round his head in ringlets like black snakes.

(The Strand Magazine, 1908 July. pp. 634-638.)