Revealing portraits
Would you like to explore the life and work of famous musicians through their portraits? "The ideal portrait of a musician" by Ute Jung-Kaiser makes it possible.
What do portraits of great musicians tell us? The German musicologist Ute Jung-Kaiser has always included image research (iconography) in her monographs on Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Wagner and others. Now she presents an illuminating volume on the subject: The ideal portrait of a musician. From Luther to Schönberg. The book is almost 530 pages thick and heavy, and the paper quality has to show off the pictures to their best advantage.
The introduction is made easier by the division into 24 portraits, and once you get into the subject, you will enjoy reading it. The selected pictures of famous and intensively researched composers from music history provide interesting and essential information about their personalities and the reception of their music. It is a pity that not a single female composer is included.
Jung-Kaiser chooses a portrait of the mythical singer Orpheus as the starting point for her study, the ideal of the musician par excellence, as he is able to overcome death by singing for his beloved. His portrait serves as a role model and becomes a prototype for the musicologist. Her choice of images is characterized by the basic question: Which of these portraits get to the heart of the matter? Which ones say something about what defined the artist's personality? According to Jung-Kaiser, the optimum that a portraitist can achieve is when the picture "sounds". The painter Franz Nölken (1884-1918), for example, achieves this in his portrait of Max Reger: "Nölken masterfully captures Reger, who is completely focused on his work in a summery, sunny atmosphere, in a composition of color surfaces and impressionistic treatment of light."
An oil sketch by Isidor Neugass (c. 1780-1874) entitled "Color surface composition" shows us that it was not only discovered by the Impressionists. Joseph Haydn composing. The play of light in the warm colors (brown and gold) evokes an aura, a musical sound space in which Haydn sits at his desk in a pensive, inward-looking pose. The astonishingly lifelike wax bust, created around 1795 by Franz Christian Thaler with Haydn's real hair, appears soulless, even banal.
Jung-Kaiser repeatedly includes the death masks of the artists in her observations, the last lifelike image of the face. And especially in the modern era, self-portraits of composers are also considered: Arnold Schönberg, for example, often painted himself, or then the very talented draughtsman Paul Hindemith. This provides an insight into the composers' self-image, which the author is able to reveal with unerring quotations and knowledgeable descriptions of each portrait subject.
In this way, inside and outside views come together in a confined space, images are compared and evaluated in terms of their message, and we get surprisingly close to the essence of these brilliant people. The less representation and pathetic idealization in a portrait, the better, writes Jung-Kaiser. This book thus offers interesting aspects of the reception of the music and the personalities of those portrayed that have only been marginally addressed in research to date.
Ute Jung-Kaiser: The ideal portrait of a musician. From Luther to Schönberg, 528 p., over 350 illustrations, € 82.00, Georg Olms, Hildesheim and others 2019, ISBN 978-3-487-15792-4
