Sounding Silence:
Mozart, Music, and the Visual Arts

Katelijne Schiltz and Hilde Van Gelder

Introduction: a common affinity?

When composers, performers or listeners are talking about music, it is striking to notice how often, either consciously or unconsciously, they are using terms that are first and foremost associated with the visual arts. Whilst for example describing the aural effect of a particular instrument or instrumental combination of an orchestra, one often uses words like colour or warmth. Tonalities too, are not seldom compared with nuances of darkness or brightness: major tonalities (having a major third in the tonic) tend to be associated with ‘light’, while minor tonalities (having a minor third in the tonic) are usually said to be ‘dark’ (Jewanski 2001, 156-160). Music can also be described in terms of texture – a word which etymologically has its origins in the craft of weaving (Lat.: texere). A passage for full orchestra can be said to have a ‘full texture’, while a passage with reduced instrumental forces (for example a soloist in a concerto) is characterised by a ‘thin texture’. A composition can thus often be interpreted as an organic fluctuation in textures. On a more abstract and formal level, a musical piece also has a certain depth, as it contains several hierarchically differentiated dimensions and layers, from small recurring motifs and phrases over periods to large-scale forms and movements.

Interestingly enough, in Mozart’s lifetime, these similarities and the relation between music and the visual arts were the subject of numerous philosophical and scientific investigations as well as literary outpourings. In his treatise with the highly suggestive title Ueber die musikalische Malerey (1780), Johann Jakob Engel discusses exactly the kind of correspondences between the aural and visual impressions we have just described. According to him, similarities do exist between the arts that go beyond the individual senses: ‘There are similarities, not only between objects of one sense, but also between objects of different senses. For example, one can find slowness and swiftness in a series of tones as well as in a series of visual impressions. I wish to call all such similarities transcendental similarities’.¹ A few years before Engel’s publication, Johann Friedrich Reichardt - Frederick the Great’s future chapel-master - had already expanded upon such a remarkable ‘Aehnlichkeit’ in one of his Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend (1774-1776). In this piece of writing, he draws a parallel between the composer’s use of dynamics (loud or soft) and the painter’s use of colours (light or dark). In either case, the meaning can differ according to the particular context: ‘Both forte and piano are in Adagio very different from what
they are in Allegro; the painter, similarly, uses very different degrees of light and shade in depicting a sad or gentle situation and in a merry banquet scene or furious battle piece’ (Tolley 2001, 144-145).

The discourse on the correspondences between artistic disciplines was of course not initiated during the Age of Enlightenment, since it goes back to much earlier times. In the seventeenth century already, men of science such as Isaac Newton and Athanasius Kircher had developed theories about analogies between music and visual elements in general and colours in particular. In his Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light (1675), Newton associated the seven colours of the spectrum with the seven principal intervals (from second to octave). This treatise was made accessible to a wider public by Francesco Algarotti: the success of his Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) is testified by numerous English and German translations. Before Newton, Athanasius Kircher had already presented a system for linking colours and intervals in his Musurgia universalis (1650). A similar idea was proposed in Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646) in which he even added tables to explain the analogies between notes, colours, intensities of light and degrees of brightness. Perhaps the most famous example of ambitions to create an aesthetic of visual music is Father Castel’s clavecin oculaire (1729-1754). Father Castel carried out daring experiments, in which he tried to connect musical notes with colours; green for example was made to correspond to re. In his opinion, a combination of diverse sensual experiences would produce a much richer artistic experience. In other words, he actually believed a truly kinaesthetic art could be possible.

In the romantic period too, one continued to write about the similarities between music and the visual arts. These are for instance expressed in a rather intuitive way by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, who is the main figure in many of Hoffmann’s stories. He could be considered as the prototype of a ‘Künstler’ for whom crossing the boundaries between the disciplines and the senses was something natural: ‘I find colours, notes and scents all coming together, not so much in a dream as in that state of delirium that precedes sleep, particularly when I have been listening to a great deal of music’ (Jewanski 2001, 157).

It seems reasonable to assume that for artists, such as Mozart, seeing and exploring the link between music and the visual arts was more or less self-evident. As several of Mozart’s letters reveal, the composer was highly sensitive to visual stimuli. Witness many of his travels with his father Leopold, during which they spent almost as much time admiring works of art as attending concerts. In a letter written on 17 October 1763, we can read about their fascination for the fifteenth-century altarpiece by Dirk Bouts at Saint Peter’s Church in Louvain. Two years later, during one of their travels in the Low Countries, father and son must have been deeply touched by Rubens’ Descent from the Cross in the Antwerp Cathedral, as testifies Leopold’s letter of 19 September 1765 (Tolley 2001, 16-17).

Not only Mozart, but other famous composers as well showed a similar interest in the visual arts. Joseph Haydn and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach were even genuine collectors of works of art. As can be deduced from a catalogue drawn up after his death, Haydn did not only keep paintings from the Old Masters and literary prints, but also caricatures and portraits (Tolley 2001, 324-327). Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach seems to have had a predilection for portraits, especially of his colleague-composers.
As the famous Charles Burney witnesses in one of his extensive travel reports, the composer had 'a large and elegant music room, furnished with pictures, drawings and prints of more than a hundred and fifty musicians: among whom, there are many Englishmen, and original portraits, in oil of his father and grandfather’ (Scholes 959, 219). It is thus clear that, from a very early age on, musicians have been particularly attracted to the portrait genre. The birth of the photographic medium in the late 1830s certainly came to fill an important role in this respect. Moreover, ever since photographs of musicians, directors or composers came to illustrate record sleeves, the medium has revolutionised the music industry. Who would not remember Herbert von Karajan’s photogenic face on the DG-records?