Thomas Wilmer Dewing's Women with Musical Instruments

Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938) -- Wikipedia entry here -- painted many gauzy, dreamy images of women in a style so distinctive that it would be difficult for another artist to mimic it in order to carve out a successful career.

I rather like his work and am always pleased when I stumble across one of his paintings in a museum.

The settings Dewing chose varied.  Below are examples of women shown with musical instruments -- one of his major themes.  They are arranged in approximate chronological order.

Gallery

Lady with a Lute - 1886
This was before he settled on his gauzy style.

The Piano - 1891
This is clearly mainline Dewing.  Note the lack of a realistic background.

Music - c. 1895
Here he combines two of his themes -- a woman with a musical instrument and women in a outdoor setting.

The Spinet - c. 1902
This is more hard-edge than usual.

The Lute - 1903
Also painted more crisply.  Perhaps he was considering backing away from his signature style at this time.

Brocart de Venise - c. 1904
Now Dewing drifts back to fuzzy, nondescript backgrounds.

The Song and the Cello - c. 1910
In his outdoor scenes Dewing often had his women as small elements of the overall painting.  Here he tries it in an indoors setting.

Young Woman with Violincello - c. 1912
This is the latest (approximately) dated image of this set.

La musicienne

Lady with a Cello
These two paintings did not have dates associated with them.  However, they were likely made in the early 1900s.

Lionello Balestrieri: Painter, Music Lover

Lionello Balestrieri (1872-1958) received honors in his day, but now seems to be considered a minor figure. For instance, although he was an Italian, there is no Italian language Wikipedia entry for him as of mid-September when I'm drafting this post. The entry in English is here, and there also is one in French offering other details regarding his life and career.

Balestrieri experimented with various styles, but most of his images seen on the Internet seem to be from the years around the turn of the 20th century when he hadn't strayed very far from traditional painting. That is, he didn't distort the proportions of his subjects, but his brushwork varied.

Music seemed to be a passion, and he painted many works dealing with the music scene.

Gallery

Il bacio

The Painter and Pianist

Beethoven (Kreutzer Sonata) - 1900
Beethoven is the bust in the background.

Woman on a Paris Street at Night

Chopin Triptych: Chopin and George Sand - c.1905

Chopin Triptych: Death of Chopin - c.1905

Andando a teatro - c.1910

Giovane donna che sorseggia il tè - 1910-14

Autoritratto in piedi - 1929

Opera Notes

My wife likes for us to attend opera, so I go. Last week it was Mozart's Magic Flute which we'd previously seen in San Jose. The Seattle Opera production was better, the role of bird-man Papageno more clarified as comic relief. Anyway, I left the hall for home with a couple of thought-themes rattling around my head:

* * * * *
Opera plots normally don't have much to them. Usually there's a love interest. That serves to generate some dramatic conflict of the expected sort, but other crises and twists are sometimes inserted despite the glacial dramatic pace necessitated by the singing.

Magic Flute plays up an idealized secret society comprised of wise, superior, truth-speaking, tolerant people who ... well, it wasn't clear to me just what they did except that they were able to exercise some sort of power in what remained an imperfect world in spite of that power. Much of the second act dealt with some sort of initiation process built around the love interest. Yes, opera plots are largely fantasies, but I find the idealistic secret society bit particularly archaic from the standpoint today's world. Legends and mythology I don't mind because they are timeless, but secret societies are too rooted in history for me to be pulled into the story line easily.

Secret societies were Hot Stuff in Mozart's day and this continued through the 19th century in the form of college fraternities, sororities and non-college groups as well. What really got me was the idealistic notion that mankind could be so perfectible, at least in the form of an intellectually and morally pure elite. People in their late teens and early twenties can still buy into this notion, but life experience and the reading of history combine to make me wonder what Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder were thinking. They were young and living in the Age of Enlightenment after all. But that "relevance" to their time negated the possibility of "timelessness" to their opera. That and the utopian notion of abolishing human nature.

* * * * *
Another thought. From what I've read, European audiences up until nicely into the 20th century were quite capable of expressing dislike for theatrical productions by booing, hooting and even throwing objects onto the stage. At the Seattle Opera, audiences are prone to wildly applaud almost anything and never, ever boo or hiss. In fact, the only breaks in decorum I've experienced there were some loud whoops of approval during curtain calls.

Did those Europeans know something Seattleites don't? Which kind of audience reaction is preferable when a performance is sub-par? And just how can one indicate disapproval in such a polite atmosphere? Beats me.

Should the Detroit Symphony Die?

Not being anything close to an expert on such swaths of art as music, drama and literature, I tend to use articles by people who know the stuff as hooks for my posts on these matters. Perhaps my favorite go-to guy is Terry Teachout, who wears many arts hats including that of theater critic for the Wall Street Journal.

In his bi-weekly non-theater "Sightings" column for the Journal's 18 September issue he discusses the plight of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra which is running an operating deficit to the tune of around $9 million this year and facing a strike by musicians unwilling to take a proposed pay cut to help the balance sheet.

He notes

The numbers tell the tale: Nearly two million people lived in Detroit in 1950. The current population is 800,000. Forty of the city's 140 square miles are vacant. Downsizing is the name of the save-Detroit game, and Mayor Dave Bing, who is looking at an $85 million budget deficit, wants to slash civic services drastically and encourage Detroit's remaining residents to cluster in the healthiest of its surviving neighborhoods.

Can a once-great city that is now the size of Austin, Texas, afford a top-rank symphony orchestra with a 52-week season? Does it even want one? The DSO, after all, is not the only one of Detroit's old-line high-culture institutions that is sweating bullets. The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Michigan Opera Theater are also in trouble...

Sorry Terry, but the numbers you're using are misleading. You are citing data for cities based on populations within city limits. But city boundaries define the political city and not the physical city which is best represented by urbanized area or metropolitan area data. For example, the 2000 census had the Detroit metro area with near four million people (Wikipedia link here) -- nothing to sneeze at. It is that population, not just the population within the city limits, which comprises the pool of potential supporters and attendees of the orchestra, art museum and so forth.

Even so, the orchestra is in serious trouble. Terry concludes

But the players' decision to respond to the orchestra's financial crisis by voting to strike is a classic symptom of the cultural-entitlement mentality—the assumption that artists ought to be paid what they "deserve" to make, even when the community in which they live and work places a significantly lower value on their services. Any economist can tell you what has happened: In Detroit, being a classical instrumentalist is no longer an upper-middle-class job.

We like to think that great symphony orchestras and museums are permanent monuments to the enduring power and significance of art, but in the 21st century, we are going to learn the hard way that this is simply not true. Great high-culture institutions reflect the fundamental character of a city. In America, most of these institutions were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifestations of civic pride. But when a city's character undergoes profound changes, as has happened in Detroit, the institutions are bound to reflect that transformation. One way or another, they'll follow the money—and if there is no money to follow, they'll go out of business. The sad truth is that the Detroit Symphony is no more "permanent" than . . . well, your average auto company.

I am with him on this. We have to earn our keep.

Grumpy About Wagner

Yesterday I sat through the Seattle Opera's production of Richard Wagner's Tristn und Isolde (hereafter, T&I). And boy did it make me grumpy.

I suppose some of this is because I'm not a strong music fan in the first place and attend opera only because my wife would be very disappointed if I didn't accompany her to one.

The Wikipedia link above goes into a good deal of detail regarding T&I's background, plot and reactions to it over time. Apparently a number of well-known composers were enthralled by it and historians of music say the it was an influential work. Of course one can point to the artists who regarded Paul Cézanne highly and how influential his work was. That doesn't mean one absolutely must like T&I or Cézanne's paintings. I don't like either one.

My first problem with T&I was its length; with intermissions it ran four hours and 40 minutes. Three hours would be much more tolerable.

Secondly, the plot had very little action. Many important events were manifested in the form of characters singing about what had happened someplace or other off-stage: why couldn't those events have been dramatized?

Instead (point three), I had to suffer through a 40-minute stretch of the second act where Isolde and the love-potioned Tristan went through what I took to be a bunch of two-bit philosophizing and analogy-making about love. I quickly reached the point where I stopped reading the captions and gave serious thought to falling asleep, my time being cruelly wasted by matters that could have been disposed of in five or ten minutes.

T&I is a sung-through opera with no set-piece arias. No memorable melodies either, at least none that I caught. I also didn't pick up on leitmotifs that were supposedly there. So the music (which tended to underline sung thoughts or emotions) was lush, but to a large extent nondescript to my unmusical ears.

So for me T&I was basically a waste of time and money.

Many will disagree, and that's fine. I'm just venting here and don't expect to convert anyone to my point of view. Moreover I find that most operas are tedious, chewing up plenty of time where nothing much happens. And the songs about love strike the 2010 me as insipid even though they must have great appeal to 1880 others.

T&I was my third Wagner opera (after Der fliegende Holländer and Die Walküre), so three strikes and he's out, so far as I'm concerned.

Delibes is Da Best (Sort of)

I almost never go to ballet. Fundamentally, it's pantomime set to music, and I have little use for pantomime (though yes, I played charades a few times when I was young).

But there is something I do like about ballet: the music. One of my favorite ballets music-wise is Coppélia by Léo Delibes. I'm especially fond of the mazurka from the first act.

My wife wanted to see Coppélia, so we went last Sunday even though I was worried about going. Why was I worried? I was afraid that viewing the dancing might interfere with future enjoyment of the music that heretofore had no images associated with it. I worried that the next time I heard Coppélia, I'd conjure up my memory of the dancing and scenery and that would dilute the music's impact.

In any case I was committed. We went, we sat through it. We returned home. The house is disrupted due to painting, so I haven't located and played my Coppélia CD, but my guess is that I'm not likely to get much image pollution thanks in part to the ballet's length.

The production was one created by the Pacific Northwest Ballet featuring the choreography of George Balanchine. So it could be expected to be a good version of Coppélia, and probably was. (I have no background for judging which ballet productions are excellent as opposed to being just average. Same goes for opera.)

My reactions?

I liked the first act which takes place in a town square in Galicia, the part of Poland ruled by Austria-Hungary. It has most of the best music. That compensated for a fair amount of activity that didn't advance the plot (such as it was). The second act, set in the digs of toymaker Coppélius, was just okay. The third act, a town festival, was a dud so far as I was concerned. It was essentially a string of set-piece dances that were probably fine for ballet fans, but lacked any plot advancement to hold my interest.

The fault, if I can call it that, lies in the "book" of the ballet that allowed the third act to be what it was. Delibes' music for the act wasn't all that great either -- nothing like the great stuff in the first act.

Given that I'm way, way out of my league when it comes to ballet, take my comments with as much salt as you can find.