Portrait in literature and music

A good painter must paint two main things: a person and a representation of his soul.

Leonardo da Vinci

From experience pictorial views art, we know how important the appearance of the model is for the portrait. Of course, the portrait painter is interested in the latter not in itself, not as an end, but as a means - an opportunity to look into the depths of the personality. It has long been known that the appearance of a person is connected with his psyche, his inner world. Based on these relationships, psychologists, doctors, and just people with developed powers of observation and the necessary knowledge “read” information about a person’s mental properties from the iris of the eye (the eyes are the “mirror of the soul”, “window of the soul”, “gate of the soul”), features face, hand, gait, mannerisms, favorite posture, etc.

Most of all, a person's face can tell. not without reason believed that the face is the "soul of man"; as the Russian philosopher said, "it's like a navigator's map." Lido is the "plot" of the book "Personality". It is no coincidence that changing a face sometimes means turning into a different person. This interdependence of the external and internal gave impetus to the artistic imagination of writers - V. Hugo in "The Man Who Laughs", M. Frisch in "I Will Call Myself Gantenbein". It is the disfigurement of the face that seems to the hero of D. Oruzll's novel "1984" to be the final destruction of his personality. The hero of Kobo Abe's novel Alien Lido, forced by circumstances to make himself a mask, begins to live a double life under its influence. The mask that hides the face is the right to a different “image”, a different character, a different value system, a different behavior (remember Souvestre and M. Allen and film versions of their books, the plot of The Bat by I. Strauss ...).

Given how much physical description can tell, writers often use it to characterize a character. A masterfully made description makes the appearance of the character almost “alive”, visible. We seem to see individually unique provincials " dead souls". The heroes of L. Tolstoy are embossed.

Not only how a person looks, but also the environment around him, the circumstances in which he exists, also carry information about the character. This was well understood, for example, by Pushkin, introducing Onegin to the reader in the first chapter of his novel, in verse. The author has few expressive touches of the character’s personal “I” (“a young rake”, “dressed like a dandy in London”), and it is supplemented by many details of Onegin’s upbringing, his secular life with balls, theatres, flirtations, fashions, salons, dinners.

Obviously, the ability of the "circumstances of action" to testify about people found its extreme expression in the short story of the modern German writer Hermann Hesse "The Last Summer of Klingsor". The artist Klingsor, in order to write a self-portrait, refers to photographs of himself, parents, friends and lovers, for successful work he needs even stones and mosses - in a word, the whole history of the Earth. However, art has also tried another extreme - the complete cutting off of the environment from the person, which we see on the canvases of the great painters of the Renaissance: in Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, the pictures of nature are deliberately distant from the large faces that attract the attention of the viewer. Or we hear in operas: the central aria-portrait of Onegin “You wrote to me, don’t deny it” is in no way connected with the everyday sketches surrounding it - the song of the girls “Girls, beauties, darlings, girlfriends”; confessing his feelings to Lisa Yeletsky in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, as if he does not notice the bustle of the noisy ceremonial St. Petersburg ball. Contrast organizes the attention of the viewer or listener, directing it to " close-up and relaxing in the background.

Describing the color of hair and eyes, height, clothes, gait, habits, circumstances of the hero's life, the writer does not at all seek to create a "visual range" artwork. His true goal in this case (and completely conscious) lies much further: to consider the human soul in external signs. Here is how the great French portrait painter of the 18th century, Quentin de Latour, said about this: “They think that I capture only the features of their faces, but without their knowledge I plunge into the depths of their soul and take it entirely.”

How does music portray a person? Does it embody the visible? To understand this, let's compare three portraits of the same person - the outstanding German composer of the late XIX - early XX centuries, Richard Strauss.

This is how (by no means an angel, but a living person) Romain Rolland saw him: “He still looks like an adult distracted child with pouted lips. Tall, slender, rather elegant, arrogant, he seems to belong to a finer race than the other German musicians among whom he is found. Disdainful, satiated with success, very demanding, he is far from being with the rest of the musicians in peace-loving modest relations, like Mahler. Strauss is no less nervous than he is... But he has a great advantage over Mahler: he knows how to rest. it has features of Bavarian looseness. I am sure that after the expiration of those hours when he lives an intense life and when his energy is expended extremely, he has hours, as it were, of non-existence. Then you notice his wandering and half-asleep eyes.

Two other portraits of the composer - sound ones - were "painted" by him in the symphonic poem "The Life of a Hero" and in the "Home Symphony". Musical self-portraits are in many ways similar to the description of R. Rolland. However, let's think about which aspects of the personality are "voiced". It is unlikely that, listening to music, we would have guessed that the prototype is “tall, slender, rather elegant”, that he has “the appearance of an adult sensible child with pouted lips” and “wandering and sleepy eyes”. But here are other features of Strauss-man, revealing his emotional world (nervousness, slight excitability and drowsiness) and important character traits (arrogance, narcissism) are convincingly conveyed by music.

Comparison of the portraits of R. Strauss illustrates a more general pattern. The language of music is not particularly conducive to visual associations, but it would be reckless to completely discard such a possibility. Most likely, the external, physical parameters of the personality can only partially be reflected in the portrait, but only indirectly, indirectly, and to the extent that they are in harmony with the mental properties of the personality.

It is easy to make one more observation. A picturesque portrait seeks to capture the deepest personality traits through appearance, while a musical portrait has the opposite possibility - “grasping the essence” of a person (his emotional nature and character), allows enrichment with visual associations. The literary portrait, occupying an intermediate place between them, contains an informative description and appearance, and the emotional-characteristic "core" of the personality.

So, any portrait contains emotion, but it is especially significant in a musical portrait. We are convinced of this by a noticeable phenomenon in the world musical culture- miniatures by the French composer of the late 17th - early 18th centuries Francois Couperin, composed for the forerunner of the modern piano, the harpsichord. Many of them depict people well known to the composer: the wife of one of the organists of the royal church, Gabriel Garnier ("La Garnier"), the wife of the composer Antoine Forcret ("Magnificent, or Forcret"), the bride of Louis XV Maria Leszczynska ("Princess Marie") , the young daughter of the Prince of Monaco, Antoine I Grimaldi ("Princess de Chabay, or the Muse of Monaco"). Among the “models” there are people who obviously surrounded the composer (“Manon”, “Angelica”, “Nanette”), and even relatives. In any case, the method of recreating a human personality is the same: through individual emotion. His Manon is cheerful and carefree, solemnly majestic appears in the ceremonial portrait of Antonin, Mimi's appearance is painted in more lyrical tones. And all of them are like a continuation of the portrait gallery collected in the book of the great writer and philosopher Jacques de La Bruyère "Characters, or Morals of the present century."

TO detailed description The emotional world of a person is also located an opera aria. It is curious that in the Italian opera of the 17th - early 18th centuries, a tradition developed to single out the main emotion of the character in the aria, the main affect. The main emotions gave life to the types of arias: arias of sorrow, arias of anger, arias of horror, arias-elegies, bravura arias and others. Later, composers try to convey not one all-encompassing state of a person, but a complex of emotions inherent in him, and thereby achieve a more individual and deep characterization. Such as in the cavatina (that is, the exit aria) of Lyudmila from the opera Ruslan and Lyudmila by Glinka. The composer is clearly inspired by Pushkin's image:

She is sensitive, modest,

Faithful conjugal love,

A little windy ... so what?

She is even cuter.

Ludmila's aria consists of two sections. The first, introductory, - an appeal to the father - is imbued with light sadness, lyricism. The wide melody, sounding at a slow pace, is interrupted, however, by flirtatious phrases.

In the second, main section, we learn the main features of the heroine: cheerfulness, carelessness. Accompanied by "dancing" polka chords, the melody quickly overcomes complex leaps and rhythmic "slips" (syncopes). Ringing, shimmering high coloratura soprano Lyudmila.

Here is another musical portrait, "written" already without the participation of the voice - the play "Mercutio" by Sergei Prokofiev from the piano cycle "Romeo and Juliet". Music radiates overflowing energy. Fast tempo, elastic rhythms, free transfers from the lower register to the upper register and vice versa, bold intonation breaks in the melody “revive” the image of a merry fellow, a “daring young man” who “talks more in one minute than he listens to in a month”, a joker, a joker, not able to remain idle.

Thus, it turns out that a person in music is not simply endowed with some emotion invented by the author, but certainly with one that is especially indicative of the original (literary prototype, if such, of course, exists). And one more important conclusion: realizing that “one, but fiery passion” nevertheless schematizes the personality, “drives” it into a two-dimensional planar space, the composer tries to come to a certain set of emotional touches; the multi-colored "palette" of emotions allows us to describe not only the emotional world of the character, but, in fact, something much more - the character.

It turns out that a person can sound .... In notes, musical phrases, melodies, his character is revealed, his “face” is depicted. It is known that a portrait painted by an artist is able to convey the essence of a person, leaving some mystery. Every part of the face, every curve of the body on the canvas resurrects us as a person, while maintaining something intimate.

Music, like any other art form, embodies something beautiful. It conveys the mood, charging a person with positive. Very often we look for ourselves in the lines of songs, trying to catch any note and match it with our personality.

And imagine these two greatest art forms together - painting and music! Portrait of a man in music. Interesting?

Musical portrait is...

First of all, it is art that reveals your soul, musically conveys the emotions and character of a person. It is yours, personal, unique, like the person himself. With the help of a musical portrait, you examine yourself from different angles, revealing ever deeper facets of your inner world. The melody written off actually from your “I” contributes to the improvement of the spiritual state - there is no arguing with that! After all, listening to certain music, you experience emotions. And if it is the music of your soul? Did you have to look at it from the outside? This is an indelible impression - reality takes on a different shape: love, beauty, infinity ...

How is a musical portrait composed?

Have you ever wondered what peace is? Sometimes, in certain moments, you feel some peace of mind. You don't care about anything, you walk on endless paths, there, deep inside. When thoughts are lost, and you are immersed in something more that cannot be described. This something rises from deep within, from the most secret chambers of the heart.

How many people are able to read the unknown world?
A musical portrait can only be created by a genius, a genius of the soul. He can not only read, but also play it into music, feel, understand your thinking, consciousness, open your will. Play the music that plays inside you.

All the fullness of the art of creating a musical portrait lives in a unique environment of the intuitive world. In order to create it, the composer needs personal contact with a person or a personal photograph or video recording. When all the information about a person is collected, the musician records a portrait in the studio, providing the melody with high-quality sound. In practice, it also happened that the composer writes down a musical portrait in the presence of the person he writes about. But in any case, with or without a personal meeting, the quality will not change. In any case, this will be what is called - a musical image of the inner world.

Do you want to hear how a musical portrait sounds?

A musical portrait has two types of creation:

1) Improvisation (impromptu) is the re-creation of the author's feelings immediately into the recording

2) A written piece is a complex, elaborate composition in notes. This kind of composition can later be arranged. This melody has the appearance of a work on which you need to work for a certain time.

Musical portrait - historical heritage and exclusive gift

Modern man is very hard to surprise, isn't it? Imagine that you receive yourself as a gift - your inner world, long-familiar and dear to you feelings and experiences?.. Only clothed in the language of music. This is not only relevant and new to our world, it seems incredible and unimaginable!

By ordering a musical portrait, you can make a gift to your loved one. After all, the author can write a musical portrait of you personally or, for example, express your feelings for your loved one - portray him the way you see him! A musician can paint a portrait about love, friendship, and so on. In a musical portrait, you can embody all the versatility of a person!

You can learn about the service and order a musical portrait

Mikheeva Margarita Eduardovna, teacher of the highest qualification category, "Novouralsk secondary school No. 59", Novouralsk

Art lesson (music) in the 5th grade III quarter.
Lesson topic: Musical portrait.
Lesson type: Learning new material.
The purpose of the lesson: to show the relationship between music and painting through the figurative perception of the world.

Tasks:

1. teaching:
   1. to form thinking skills - generalization, the ability to listen and prove;
   2. development of the ability to compare, contrast;
   3. the formation of the skill of integrating various types of art;
   4. to consolidate the concept - means of musical expressiveness: character, intonation, melody, mode, tempo, dynamics, image, form;
   5. learn to compare works of music and painting;
   6. to acquaint with the work of M.P. Mussorgsky;
   7. to teach children to feel poetry, musicality and picturesqueness artistic images;
2. developing: to develop emotions, fantasy, imagination of students with a comparative perception of musical, artistic and literary works;
3. corrective:
   1. creating conditions for optimization creativity students;
   2. educational: to teach children to feel the poetry of musical and pictorial artistic images.

• verbal-inductive (conversation, dialogue);
• visual-deductive (comparison);
• partial search (improvisation);

Equipment: Audio and video equipment. ICT. Portrait of M.P. Mussorgsky, reference cards, POWER POINT presentation.

Music material:
"Baba Yaga" M.P. Mussorgsky, the song "Captain Nemo" music. Ya. Dubravina, sl. V. Suslova.

Presentation on the work of M. Mussorgsky, cartoon "Pictures at an Exhibition".

Form of work: group, individual.

DURING THE CLASSES:

Organizing time.
Musical greeting.
Students are offered an associative series: a portrait of "Alenushka" Vasnetsov, a portrait of Mussorgsky, a fragment of the song "Captain Nemo" music. Ya. Dubravina, sl. V. Suslova.
Students must formulate the topic of the lesson on the basis of the associations they see.

W.: Our topic today is "Portrait in Music". What is a "portrait" in fine art?

D .: the image of a person in full height; to portray several people, if you depict people to the shoulders - this is a portrait.

U .: what can we see in the portrait?

D.: suit; hairstyle character; mood; young or old; rich or poor.

DW: How does a musical portrait differ from a portrait in painting?

D: You can't see it all at once, you have to listen to all the music to see it in your imagination. It lasts in time; conveys movement, mood; the picture can be viewed slowly, and the piece of music continues for some time and ends; in the picture everything is visible at once, but when you listen to music, you have to imagine something; And different people everyone can imagine...

DW: Remind me what means of expression the artist uses to create his paintings?

D: palette, color, stroke, stroke, etc.

Q: What means of expression does the composer use to create a musical image?

D: dynamics, tempo, register, timbre, intonation.

U .: in front of you on the board (cards) are written means of musical expression. Choose those that will help you understand the musical portrait. Explain their purpose.
(Recorded: form, tempo, rhythm, mode, dynamics, melody)

D: tempo is the speed of the music, it allows you to determine how the hero moved; allows you to learn something about the character of the hero.
Fret - major or minor - creates the mood of the hero. Major is usually a joyful mood, minor is sad, thoughtful.
Dynamics is loudness: the closer the hero is to us, the louder the music sounds.
Melody is the image of the hero, his thoughts; these are our thoughts on it.

U .: All this knowledge will help us understand how the composer creates musical portraits and what helps him in this.
M.P. Mussorgsky created many nationally vivid musical images, in which he reveals the uniqueness of the Russian character.
"My music should be an artistic transmission of the human language in all the subtlest nuances" MP Mussorgsky.
Mussorgsky is the creator of various musical portraits.
We will talk about such images - musical portraits - in our lesson. Let's remember what a musical portrait is?
A musical portrait is a portrait of the hero's character. It inextricably combines the expressive and pictorial power of the intonations of the musical language.
Today we will get acquainted with a musical portrait, only fabulous.
We will have two creative teams of music experts who will try to understand the portrait created by M.P. Mussorgsky.

The class is divided into two creative groups.
Tasks:

• follow the evolution of music
• analyze the means of musical expression, their use,
• give a name to the image in the portrait.

Hearing: MP Mussorgsky "Baba Yaga" from the series "Pictures at an Exhibition".
The analysis of the listened work is carried out by representatives of two creative groups.

U: guys, let's see how the film director I. Kovalevskaya imagined the image of Baba Yaga, who created the cartoon based on piece of music"Baba Yaga" from the piano cycle "Pictures at an Exhibition". Does the image of Baba Yaga from the cartoon match your presented images?

Summary of the lesson.
What did we talk about in class today?
Music is visual. With the help of inner vision, imagination, we can imagine what the composer tells us about.
Teacher: So you managed to express your feelings, emotions, fantasy in word drawings.
Summary of the lesson.

U .: The topic of our today's lesson was called "Portrait in Music." Whose portrait did we meet today?

D: Baba Yaga!

DW: Music is visual. With the help of inner vision, imagination, we can imagine what the composer tells us about. It means that you managed to express your feelings, emotions, fantasy in word drawings.

W: And now... homework: 1) draw Baba Yaga the way you imagined her from Mussorgsky's work. 2) compose a song or ditty about Baba Yaga.
Reflection.

T: Guys, what new did you learn at the lesson today?
(Students are offered to fill out self-assessment sheets).

T: Our lesson is over, thank you guys, you did a very good job.

Music section publications

Musical portraits

Zinaida Volkonskaya, Elizaveta Gilels, Anna Esipova and Natalia Sats are real stars of past centuries. The names of these women were known far beyond the borders of Russia, music lovers all over the world were waiting for their performances and productions. Kultura.RF talks about creative way four outstanding performers.

Zinaida Volkonskaya (1789–1862)

Orest Kiprensky. Portrait of Zinaida Volkonskaya. 1830. State Hermitage

After the death of his teacher, Sergei Prokofiev wrote: “I turned out to be her last winning student from that colossal phalanx of laureates that she prepared at her factory”.

Natalia Sats (1903–1993)

Natalia Sats. Photo: teatr-sats.ru

Since childhood, Natalia has been surrounded by people of creativity. Family friends and frequent guests of the Moscow home were Sergei Rachmaninov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Evgeny Vakhtangov and other artists. And her theatrical debut took place when the girl was barely a year old.

In 1921, 17-year-old Natalia Sats founded the Moscow Theater for Children (modern RAMT), artistic director which remained for 16 years. One of the most respected domestic theater critics, Pavel Markov, recalled Sats as a "a girl, almost a girl, who quickly and energetically entered the complex system of Moscow theatrical life and forever retained a responsible understanding of her life and creative recognition". She aspired to create a theater that would become for children of all ages a portal to light and fairy world, a place of unlimited fantasy - and she succeeded.

The cult German conductor Otto Klemperer, after seeing the directorial work of Sats in children's theater, invited her to Berlin and offered to stage Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff at the Kroll Opera. For Sats, this production turned out to be a real breakthrough: she became the world's first female opera director - and, without exaggeration, a world-famous theatrical figure. Her other foreign opera performances have also become successful: Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner and The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Argentine Teatro Colon. The newspapers of Buenos Aires wrote: "Russian artist-director created new era in the art of opera. The performance [“The Marriage of Figaro”] is deeply psychological, as it happens only in drama, and this is new and attractive to the viewer.”.

After returning to the USSR in 1937, Natalia Sats was arrested as the wife of a "traitor to the motherland." Her husband, People's Commissar for Internal Trade of Israel Weitzer, was accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Sats spent five years in the Gulag, and after her release she left for Alma-Ata, as she had no right to return to Moscow. In Kazakhstan, she opened the first Alma-Ata Theater for Young Spectators, where she worked for 13 years.

In 1965, Natalia Sats, having already returned to the capital, founded the world's first Children's Musical Theatre. She staged not only children's performances, but also "adult" operas by Mozart, Puccini, and included "serious" musical classics in symphony subscriptions.

IN last years life Natalia Sats taught at GITIS, founded a charitable foundation for the promotion of art for children and wrote many books and manuals on musical education.

Elizaveta Gilels (1919–2008)

Elizaveta Gilels and Leonid Kogan. Photo: alefmagazine.com

Elizaveta Gilels, the younger sister of pianist Emil Gilels, was born in Odessa. The family of world-famous performers was by no means musical: father Grigory worked as an accountant at a sugar factory, and mother Esfir was a housewife.

Lisa Gilels picked up the violin for the first time at the age of six, and the famous Odessa teacher Peter Stolyarsky taught her the basics of musical art. As a teenager, Gilels declared herself to be a child prodigy: in 1935, the young violinist received second prize at the All-Union Competition of Performing Musicians. And in 1937, when she was 17, Elizaveta, as part of a delegation of Soviet violinists, made a splash at the Eugene Ysaye Competition in Brussels. The first prize of the competition was awarded to David Oistrakh, the second prize was awarded to a performer from Austria, and Gilels and her colleagues shared places from third to sixth. This triumphant victory glorified Elizabeth Gilels both in the Soviet Union and beyond.

When Soviet musicians returned from Belgium, they were met by a solemn procession, in which the talented, but in those years still unknown violinist Leonid Kogan was a participant. He handed his bouquet to Elizabeth Gilels, whose talent he always admired: this is how the future spouses met. True, they did not immediately become a couple. Gilels recently became a star, actively performed and toured, besides she was older. But one day she heard the performance of an unknown violinist on the radio. The virtuoso game struck her, and when the announcer announced the name of the performer - and he was Leonid Kogan - Gilels already became his big fan.

The musicians got married in 1949. Gilels and Kogan long years played in a duet, performed compositions for two violins by Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Eugene Isaiah. Elizabeth gradually abandoned solo career: in 1952, the couple had a son - Pavel Kogan, he became famous violinist and conductor, and two years later, daughter Nina appeared, a gifted pianist and talented teacher.

Since 1966, Elizaveta Gilels began to teach at the Moscow Conservatory. Violinists Ilya Kaler, Alexander Rozhdestvensky, Ilya Grubert and other talented musicians were her students. After the death of Leonid Kogan in 1982, Gilels was engaged in the systematization of his heritage: preparing books for printing and releasing records.