For Nietzsche, the greatest achievement for a human being was to become a “yes-sayer” to life. And, therefore, the highest praise he could bestow upon an individual would be an acknowledgment that they say yes to life. Nietzsche says of Raphael, with reference to his masterpiece the Transfiguration, that the Italian Renaissance painter “said yes, and did yes.” However, Nietzsche also believed that Christianity was the ultimate force of nay-saying. It is strange then that a painting of Christ’s transfiguration so inspired him.

Raphael’s Famous Painting

Raphael was commissioned to paint the Transfiguration in 1517 by Cardinal Giulio de Medici, who would later become Pope Clement VII in 1523. It was to be an altarpiece for a cathedral in the southern French town of Narbonne, where Medici held the office of archbishop.

Raphael died in 1520 before the completion of the Transfiguration. Speculation and conjecture were rife on how much of the final painting was actually done by Raphael and how much was completed by his assistants. However, during a cleaning of the painting in the 1970s, it was discovered that only some of the figures on the lower left-hand side of the work were finished by studio assistants; the rest was all Raphael’s own work.

Medici elected not to send the Transfiguration to France but decided instead to place it in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. It stayed there until 1797, when Napoleon, on campaign in Italy, took the painting back to Paris. Napoleon greatly admired Raphael, considering him the greatest artist in the world and his Transfiguration the greatest work of art. This is significant as Napoleon was Nietzsche’s most respected political figure. In his texts, he mentions the former French emperor approximately 150 times, frequently invoking him as a symbol of immense human will, though his ultimate philosophical assessment of Napoleon remained deeply complex and ambivalent.

Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, was published in 1889. That same year, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse from which he never recovered.

The chapter we are concerned with here is “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man.” Section eight of “Skirmishes” does not reference Raphael directly but rather introduces an approach to life that Nietzsche explicitly associates with the artist. He calls the section “Towards a psychology of the artist.”

Nietzsche begins by claiming intoxication is a prerequisite for art. He is not just referring to drink and drugs but to intoxications of all kinds. Some of the things he lists include sexual excitement, any strong emotions, the performance of great skill, and intoxication brought on by the climate. What all these forms of intoxication have in common is that they are experienced, he says, as “a feeling of fullness and increasing strength.”

This feeling of fullness leads artists to idealize things. This is a process, Nietzsche says, whereby the artist imposes themselves upon things, forcing out of them their main features while weeding out all that is small and inconsequential.

In section nine, Nietzsche goes on to talk about artists who achieve this state. For him, these are the only genuine artists. There are people claiming to make art that are even hailed as artists, but for Nietzsche, only those imbued with the type of intoxication he spoke of in section eight are the real deal. He goes on to make a rather odd statement that there have been no Christian artists. To which he adds:

“Don’t try to be clever and throw Raphael or some homeopathic nineteenth-century Christian at me as a counter-example: Raphael said yes, Raphael did yes, which means that Raphael was no Christian…”

Saying Yes to Life

Throughout Nietzsche’s works, we witness his struggle to be what he calls a “yes-sayer” to life. In Gay Science 276, for example, he says: “all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer!” Historical figures that Nietzsche admires are all yes-sayers.

In Twilight of the Idols “Skirmishes” 49, Goethe, probably Nietzsche’s favorite writer and author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, is said to have said “yes to all.” It is interesting to note that Napoleon, the second-most-cited historical figure in Nietzsche’s works, also loved The Sorrows of Young Werther, taking a copy with him on his campaigns.

Napoleon was also responsible for a great deal of death. Nietzsche has no problem with “yes-sayers” saying no to things that endanger the affirmation of life. Consider the following from the preface of his Will to Power:

“I teach that one must say ‘no’ to everything that weakens and exhausts. I teach that one must say ‘yes’ to everything that strengthens, promotes the accumulation of power, and [increases] pride.”

Nietzsche admires those who say yes to all things, which includes saying no to anything that opposes “yes-saying.”

The Birth of Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music was first published in 1872. The work was born out of two lectures Nietzsche delivered on Greek drama. Here’s what Nietzsche has to say about Raphael and the Transfiguration in this work.

“In his Transfiguration, the lower half with the possessed boy, his despairing bearers, and the helplessly fearful disciples, shows us the reflection of the eternal original suffering, of the sole ground of the world: ‘appearance’ here is the reflection of the eternal contradiction, of the father of things. Now, out of this appearance rises, like the scent of ambrosia, a new vision-like world of appearance, which remains invisible to those caught in the first world of appearance—a brilliant hovering in purest bliss and painless contemplation through beaming, wide-open eyes. Here we have before our eyes, rendered in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the horrific wisdom of Silenus, and we understand their reciprocal necessity intuitively.”

When Nietzsche talks of the Apollonian, he is, of course, referring to the Greek god Apollo. For him, “Apollonian” captures the idea of certain qualities this god was supposed to possess. Nietzsche is thinking of such things as calmness, cheerfulness, reason, and logical thinking.

Nietzsche contrasts the Apollonian spirit with the Dionysian. What exactly Nietzsche means by the Dionysian is complex and evolved greatly over time; however, we can understand the “Dionysian” as capturing the traits associated with the god Dionysus. These include intoxication, impulse, and emotion.

Nietzsche believed that Greek tragedies were imbued with both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These two drives exert themselves against each other and together help the artist create works of profound beauty.

Let us put all this together, with reference to Raphael’s Transfiguration.

Nietzsche’s Reception of Raphael’s Transfiguration

Nietzsche took great inspiration from Raphael’s Transfiguration. He must have felt a profound sense of beauty (as he understood it) on viewing the painting. Beauty for him, we remember, is not found in the world but given by human beings.

Something about beauty he also believed was that “people find beauty in everything that throws their image back at them.” (Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes” 19). What Nietzsche must have seen in Raphael’s work was, in some way, himself. And indeed, he saw the affirmation of his own idea of the struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

We saw that Nietzsche considered Raphael a true artist and that, for Nietzsche, intoxication is an essential prerequisite of art. He believed that Raphael had a driving passion to use his artistic power to reveal the main features of life while paring away that which is small and inconsequential. To Nietzsche, this is what makes Raphael a yes-sayer to life.

His Transfiguration is then a giant yes to life for all who can see, to see. Raphael, through his work, counters the terrible nay-saying wisdom of Silenus.

What then of Nietzsche’s curious statement, mentioned above, that Raphael could not be a Christian (because Christians cannot create art)? Nietzsche believed art must say yes to life, but that Christianity as a religion was thoroughly nay-saying with regard to life. Like most of Nietzsche’s views, his position on Christianity is complex and nuanced.

His comments on Raphael and Christianity are useful for giving us a better idea of his esteem for the artist and his work. For Nietzsche, to be a yes-sayer to life is the highest achievement, and to call someone a yes-sayer the highest praise.

Caravaggio’s victim was Ranuccio Tomassoni, and he was what we would today call a gangster, coming from a wealthy Roman family. But how exactly did he lose his life? Was this a planned murder, or a brawl that got out of control? Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading in absentia, with a bounty placed on his head. The court even set an open bounty for him to be brought to justice, dead or alive. Let us uncover why the story of the killing continues to baffle historians.

Did Caravaggio’s Enemies Shape His Reputation?

Was Caravaggio truly a murderer in the modern sense, or did rivals and early biographers exaggerate his crimes? Some of the artist’s earliest critics believed his violent paintings reflected his character. The painter Giovanni Baglione famously claimed that Caravaggio “died as badly as he painted.” Later writers went even further. The art historian and critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori depicted him holding a sword instead of a brush, turning the painter into a symbol of artistic rebellion and danger.

His art was dominated by tenebrism, a heightened chiaroscuro that enhanced the acutely realistic depiction of people. Caravaggio’s characters not only possessed an unprecedented dramatism that would define the Baroque, but they were all too human. For his polished contemporaries, painting saints as commoners was nothing short of a crime.

The German artist and writer Joachim von Sandrart offered another explanation. For him, Caravaggio’s tragic death symbolized the end of one artistic age and the beginning of another. In this version of the story, Caravaggio did not simply die as a criminal in exile. He became the symbol of the dramatic turning point between the elegance of Mannerism and the realism of the Baroque.

Caravaggio’s Endless Criminal Record

Caravaggio had a pattern of bad behavior. He fled Milan for Rome after repeated physical altercations that culminated in the injury of a police officer. In Rome alone, between 1598 and 1606, he committed seven incidents before being accused of murder. Caravaggio left us with such a rich dossier that a recent exhibition in Rome could only focus on his devious behavior.

He was arrested twice for carrying a sword and a dagger without a permit; he was sued for beating a stranger with a stick and tearing his cape with a sword. And the record does not stop there. Caravaggio even assaulted a waiter by throwing artichokes at him because he didn’t distinguish between butter and oil artichokes. The story is as well-documented as it is absurd.

His Powerful Protectors in Rome

The question is then, how did troubled Caravaggio manage to escape prison for so long? Short answer: he survived thanks to a strong network of aristocrats and mighty patronage from Roman cardinals. In exchange for his art, he received unconditional legal, political, and financial support. Among the most prominent patrons Caravaggio had was cardinal Scipione Borghese. The high-profile support of the Church protected him closely, even if his reputation and painting style caused a scandal.

Probably the most central figure in Caravaggio’s ascent in Rome came from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Del Monte introduced Caravaggio to elite collectors during his very early days in Rome. Thanks to him, the artist obtained the Contarelli Chapel commission and got to know the powerful Mattei and Barberini families. That immunity and protection were going to reach their limits.

What We Know About the Killing

Contemporary reports unanimously agree that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni. The transcripts of his police records fill many pages. Caravaggio’s regular brawls were largely easy to bail out of by his powerful patrons in Rome. But not his last crime. What went down on May 29, 1606 between him and Ranuccio Tomassoni was beyond saving.

What the documents show is that the two had many violent arguments. The fatal fight was most certainly an unintentional killing prompted by a sword duel. Documents also say that it was arranged by eight other participants. One of Caravaggio’s supporters was also seriously injured.

What Prompted the Duel?

Countless rumors circulated after the incident. Many thought the quarrel was due to a gambling debt and a disagreement during a pallacorda game (a precursor of tennis). This was going to become the most entrenched account of all. Others reported that the duel, which took place in Campo Marzio, was driven by jealousy over a famous courtesan from Rome named Fillide Melandroni.

She was a model and lover of Caravaggio, and Tomassoni may have acted as her protector. In this scenario, Caravaggio aimed to castrate his adversary – some said he then used the same sword to murder him, others hinted that Tomassoni died as a result of the violent castration. Voices even suggested that the duel was fueled by political animosity, as Tomassoni’s family were loud supporters of the Spanish, whereas Caravaggio was partial to the French. No matter what happened, the consequences of the incident were too serious to escape through political favor. With this, Caravaggio’s Roman period came to an abrupt end.

In today’s terms, what went down was not premeditated murder, but rather resembled manslaughter. As the many statements show, it was difficult to determine the exact details of Tomassoni’s death and how Caravaggio provoked it. What is unequivocal is his sentence: beheading for murder. In the lingo of the times, that was called bando capitale.

The bounty that was attached to his sentence gave anyone who recognized him the license to kill him in the name of justice. The court sentence was the culmination of years of problems with the law, marked by recurrent arrests, summons, and fines, stemming from Caravaggio’s terrible legal record. With Tomassoni’s murder, Caravaggio had crossed the line from petty to murderous crime.

The Setting of an Exile: Naples and Malta

Caravaggio found refuge in Naples, at the court of Constanza Collona Sforza, far from the jurisdiction of Roman courts. In the aftermath of the sentence, the painter started to consistently depict beheadings. The characters he portrays, be they St. John the Baptist or David, resemble the artist. This led many art historians to believe he illustrated his own impending execution. After a few productive months in Naples, he headed to Malta in 1607, where Constanza’s son, Fabrizio Sforza Collona, was a Knight.

Scholars speculate that Caravaggio was hoping to obtain a pardon for Tomassoni’s killing from the Grand Master of the Malta Knights, Alof de Wignacourt. The painter thus befriended him. The Master was so proud to have such a gifted artist become the painter of the Order of the Malta Knights that he went as far as granting him knighthood.

This privilege didn’t last too long. In 1608, within less than a year, Caravaggio went back to his old habits. He was arrested due to another brawl ending in violence: he fought with a knight and almost fatally injured him. After months in prison, the painter managed to escape. This episode cost him his knighthood and set him on the road again.

Sicily and the Road Back to Rome

Caravaggio’s next destination was Sicily, where he was again received with open arms by his patrons. From his Sicilian period, we have numerous monumental altarpieces that adorn churches from Syracuse to Messina. Despite the recognition and financial success, accounts from the period indicate that Caravaggio was showing many bizarre habits.

From paranoia and sleeping in fully armed attire to destroying works of art at the slightest hint of criticism, the Milanese artist was slipping gravely. Many of the biographies outlining this period point to Caravaggio’s unescapable fear and lamentable attitude. In August 1609, led by his belief that he was being chased by enemies, he sought refuge with the Collona family back in Naples. His hope was that the protection of the Collona family would aid in obtaining an official pardon from the newly elected pope, Paul V Borghese.

In October 1609, a fight and attempt on his life occurred, and this time Caravaggio was the victim. The attack was so bad that his face was disfigured.

Making Amends and Painting for Pardons

From this moment on, Caravaggio tried to make amends in both Malta and Rome. His white flags were paintings of beheadings, which he sent to Wignacourt and to his previous die-hard patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The artist counted on the family connection of his former patron and still hoped for a legal mediation with Pope Paul V.

Armed with three new paintings for Cardinal Borghese and emboldened by encouraging rumors from Rome, Caravaggio set out on the road in a small boat in July 1610. What happened afterward remains a subject of speculation, just like the story of his crime. The only solid evidence surrounding his death was a brief anonymous avviso, a type of private newsletter, which was sent from Rome to the court of Urbino. The letter, dated July 28, 1610, claimed simply that Caravaggio died of fever. Recent research placed his death ten days earlier, at Porto Ercole, in Tuscany.

Was Caravaggio Indeed a Murderer?

The short legal answer is yes. Historically, it is much more complicated, with an answer that requires wrestling with pre-modern Roman law. Caravaggio’s behavior after the alleged murder can be read both ways: as the erratic manner of a violent, vicious man trying to escape justice, or the desperate flight of someone unjustly accused of a crime he did not intend.

We have to ask ourselves how much of the reputation Caravaggio still carries today reflects historical fact, and how much reflects rivalry, myth, and Baroque-era storytelling. More than four centuries later, Caravaggio’s crime sits at the boundaries of history and legend, shaped by both rumor and historical documents. The only definite fact is that Ranuccio Tomassoni did indeed lose his life.

Maria Callas, a Greek-American operatic soprano, was one of the most influential opera singers of the 20th century. Her distinctive voice and charismatic stage presence dazzled audiences at the most famous opera houses, from La Scala in Milan to the Metropolitan in New York City, turning her into an icon in the 1950s and 1960s. As she began experiencing vocal problems, however, her career declined until she retired from the scene in 1965, when she was only 41 years old.

Maria Callas’ Biography: The Early Years

Maria Callas was born Maria Cecilia Sophia Anna on December 2, 1923, in New York City, the third child of Evangelia and George Kalogeropoulos. Her father later changed the family name to Callas, a word easier for English speakers to pronounce. Her parents, both Greek immigrants, already had a daughter, Yakinthi (“Jackie”), and a son, Vassilis, who died of meningitis in 1922 when he was only two years old. The increasingly worsening relationship between her parents turned Maria Callas’ childhood years into a challenging period. In 1937, after the end of her marriage, Evangelia returned to her native Greece with her two young daughters (Maria was 13 at the time).

From an early age, Maria Callas’ musical talent became evident to her mother, who pushed her youngest daughter to perform. The relationship between Maria and her mother, however, was rocky, with the young singer feeling her mother preferred her older sister.

“My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted… I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad,” declared Maria Callas in a 1956 interview with Time.

Upon her return to Greece, young Maria enrolled at the National Conservatory, where she studied with singer Maria Trivella. At the time, her voice was still in the contralto range, the lowest female singing voice. However, when she continued her studies at the Athens Conservatory under the guidance of Elvira de Hidalgo, Callas’s voice rose to the soprano range, the highest human vocal register. The word soprano comes from the Italian sopra (meaning “above”), which, in turn, can be traced back to the Latin superius, a term used to refer to the highest register in the 13th-16th centuries polyphonic (multipart) music.

In 1942, the young singing prodigy was ready to start her professional career, making her debut in the title role of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca in Athens. By that time, Fascist Italy had already invaded Greece. The following year, the Italian forces were joined by the German army. Greece remained under Axis control until 1944. Little is known about Callas’ life during World War II, but the singer later accused her mother of forcing her to entertain Italian and German soldiers with her singing. As a result, Maria severed all contact with her mother. While Callas’ operatic career was set back by World War II, she nevertheless continued to perform.

La Divina: An Opera Icon

After the end of the war, 22-year-old Maria Callas returned to her native New York City. By that time, she had already sung in seven operas with a total of 56 performances. While her scheduled performance as the title role of Puccini’s Turandot for the inauguration of a new theater in Chicago fell through, her career soon took off in Italy. In 1947, she made her debut at the Arena in Verona in the title role of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda in a production featuring the Italian conductor Tullio Serafin, her future mentor.

In the 1950s, her career skyrocketed, with Maria Callas performing in all the most prestigious opera houses in Europe and overseas. In the 1940s, she had mainly tackled traditional “heavier roles,” such as Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, Isolde in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the mysterious Kundry (in Wagner’s Parsifal), and Brünnhilde (the valkyrie from the Norse mythology that inspired Wagner for his Ring Cycle). Tullio Serafin, however, encouraged her to take on “lighter roles,” especially from the so-called Italian bel canto repertoire.

Meaning “beautiful singing,” bel canto is a type of operatic singing born in the 16th century that requires vocal agility and control from the performers. In the mid-1950s, Maria Callas took the operatic world by storm, performing in operas by Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti (both bel canto composers) as well as Verdi, Rossini, and Cherubini. Due to her success in these roles, the singer is often credited with reviving bel canto after a period of decline due to its technical difficulties.

In 1950, Callas made her debut at the prestigious La Scala theater in Milan in the title role of Verdi’s Aida. In the following decade, she was the lead singer in the theater’s opening night six times. Her performance as Violetta, the tragic courtesan of Verdi’s La Traviata (literally meaning “the fallen one”), in the 1953 production directed by award-winning Italian stage and film director Luchino Visconti, is still considered a benchmark. Outside of Italy, she dazzled audiences in New York City, Mexico City, Berlin, London, Paris, Chicago, and Vienna, earning the nickname La Divina (“The Divine One”) from her fans. Maria Callas, with her distinctive eyes (and capped teeth), appeared on multiple magazine covers and in television shows.

Besides her distinctive vocal tone (almost melancholic in quality), Maria Callas became known for her acting ability. While most operatic singers tended to stand in the middle of the stage and sing, Callas had an innate sense of theater and the ability to portray her roles with charisma and passion. “She had an unusual ability to seek out the emotional nuance in phrases, in her arias and in her dramatic roles that went along with that particular timbre she had,” remarks opera critic Conrad L. Osborne.

While her exacting standards and dedication to her roles made her an icon of the operatic world, they also earned her a reputation as a demanding diva, causing disagreements with theater managers. In 1958, for example, Antonio Ghiringhelli, the manager of La Scala, lowered the curtains while she was still bowing to the audience. In the same year, her dispute with the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera was widely reported in the media.

Callas also made headlines due to her feud (that divided the operatic world into two opposing factions) with Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, whose melodious and bright voice earned her the nickname voce d’angelo (angelic voice) and turned her into an international star.

What Were Maria Callas’ Most Famous Roles?

Throughout her career, Maria Callas sung more than 40 roles and recorded 20 operas. While her vocal range allowed her to perform a wide variety of roles, Callas moved theatergoers worldwide with her heartfelt interpretations of two operas: Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

Written by the 19th-century bel canto composer in 1831, Norma is a tragedy set in ancient Gaul, where the druids, led by King Oroveso, vow revenge against the occupying Roman troops. Overoso’s daughter, high priestess Norma, is in love with Roman proconsul Pollione, with whom she has two children. Pollione, however, has fallen out of love with Norma and is now courting another young novice priestess, Adalgisa.

Distraught, Norma contemplates murdering her children but cannot bring herself to do it. Meanwhile, Adalgisa promises to persuade Pollione to return to Norma. As news of the arrival of a new Roman official spreads, Overoso calls for a rebellion and demands a sacrificial victim. Norma offers herself as the victim, revealing to the druids that she has broken her vow of virginity. Deeply moved, Pollione joins her on the sacrificial pyre.

Widely praised for her powerful interpretation of the tragic but noble priestess, Callas became especially known for her rendition of Casta diva (Chaste goddess), the opera’s most famous piece, a desperate plea for peace.

Based on a French play with the same title, Puccini’s Tosca is a political and romantic tragedy set in Rome in 1800 during the Napoleonic Wars. The famed singer Tosca does not know that her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, supported the newly dissolved free Roman Republic. While working on a portrait in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Cavaradossi discovers fugitive Cesare Angelotti, a former consul of the republic, and agrees to help him hide from Baron Scarpia, the sadistic chief of police, in his secluded house in the countryside.

Sensing that Cavaradossi is hiding something from her, Tosca becomes convinced he is betraying her with another woman. When Scarpia storms into the church, he quickly realizes the painter has helped Angelotti escape. Meanwhile, Tosca arrives to tell Cavaradossi she has to cancel her date to perform in a gala. To arouse Tosca’s jealousy, Scarpia presents her with an alleged proof of Cavaradossi’s betrayal. Enraged, Tosca wants to confront her lover. A gloating Scarpia orders his men to follow her.

Upon realizing her mistake, Tosca tries to plea for her lover’s life with Scarpia, who taunts her by ordering his guards to torture Cavaradossi. Desperate, Tosca reveals Angelotti’s hiding place. Meanwhile, a messenger arrives with news of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo. Cavaradossi exults, and an enraged Scarpia sentences him to death. Tosca tries to negotiate a ransom, but Scarpia tells her he will only agree if she gives herself to him.

After singing Vissi d’arte (I lived for the art), asking God why he had forsaken her in her hour of need, Tosca reluctantly agrees to Scarpia’s proposal. The chief of police promises her he will stage a mock execution. When he tries to embrace her, Tosca stabs him to death, declaring É morto! Or gli perdono (He is dead! Now, I forgive him), a line Callas uttered with contempt mixed with anguish.

Tosca then goes to Castel Sant’Angelo, where Cavaradossi is held, explaining to him about the fake execution. The firing squad, acting on Scarpia’s orders, however, kills him. As a group of policemen arrives to arrest her, a desperate Tosca throws herself off Castel Sant’Angelo.

Who Was Maria Callas’ Husband?

During her career, Maria Callas made headlines not only for her performances but also for her love life. In 1949, she married wealthy brick manufacturer Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a man 20 years her senior who became her manager. While her husband was a shrewd businessman who managed to secure high fees, Callas later accused him of exploiting her and robbing her of her earnings.

In 1959, Callas and Meneghini were among the guests of a Mediterranean cruise organized by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on his yacht, the Christina. During the cruise, Callas fell in love with Onassis and later left her husband. Callas and Onassis’ affair was widely publicized by the media, but in 1968, the Greek businessman married Jackie Kennedy, the widow of US President John F. Kennedy.

Maria Callas’ Last Years and Cause of Death

By the time Maria Callas met Onassis, rumors had already begun to spread that her voice was experiencing a notable decline. In particular, music critics and supporters noticed her voice trembled and sometimes seemed on the verge of breaking when in the higher register. In the 1960s, as the troubles with her vocal cords increased, she decreased the number of her performances and ultimately retired in 1965. Her last operatic performance was in the title role of Tosca at the Covent Garden in London on July 5. She was only 41 years old.

In 1969, she starred in the film Medea by Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. A few years later, in 1972, she taught a series of master classes on operatic singing at the Juilliard School in New York City. Two years later, she went on a world concert tour with Italian tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, her long-time colleague (and lover). They held performances in Europe, North America, South Korea, and Japan.

The cause of the decline of Maria Callas’ voice has been the subject of endless speculation and studies. Many believe her extreme weight loss in the mid-1950s (she lost over 60 pounds in a year) and packed singing schedule are mostly to blame (in 1955 alone, she appeared in around 30 productions). Her colleague and close friend, operatic singer Tito Gobbi (who performed Baron Scarpia with Callas in several productions), however, claimed that Callas “simply” lost her confidence. According to Callas herself, her vocal troubles were caused by the weakening of the diaphragm.

In her book Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas (2021), Lyndsy Spence declares that health issues led to the singer’s early retirement. Indeed, in the 1950s, Callas began to experience a troubling loss of vision coupled with sore teeth. During a rehearsal of Tosca, her wig caught fire when she stood too close to some candles. Her colleague Tito Gobbi had to improvise to avoid a tragedy. According to Spence, Callas’ issues were due to dermatomyositis, an autoimmune condition that causes muscle weakness. To ease her symptoms, Onassis unfortunately introduced the singer to prescription drugs.

Maria Callas died from a heart attack on September 16, 1977, in Paris, where she had lived as a recluse in her later years.

Maria Callas’ Legacy

Maria Callas’ later years have sometimes overshadowed her accomplishments. While many portray her as a “tragic figure,” heartbroken by Aristotle Onassis’ betrayal, she was a trailblazer in the operatic world. Her undeniable commitment to her art and high standards made her one of the most influential singers of all time, and her performances continue to inspire younger generations of opera singers.

As her international career coincided with the spread of LP records, opera fans can still enjoy her vocal prowess and interpretations in countless recordings (both official and pirated). Maria Callas’ life has also been analyzed and retold in fiction and non-fiction books, documentaries, and films. In 1995, American playwright Terrence McNally staged her classes at Juilliard in Master Class. In 2002, Italian stage director Franco Zefirelli, who worked with Callas in several productions, directed Callas Forever. More recently, Angelina Jolie depicted the legendary singer in Maria (2024).

From figuration through Surrealism to his late Abstract Expressionist style, Rothko turned color into emotion, mortality into presence, and viewing into a spiritual encounter—works that challenge language and linger long after they are seen.

Why “Abstraction” Falls Short of Explaining Rothko

What are we to make of abstract art? Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it has attracted as many accusations as praises. Because it does not depict the visible world, some have dismissed it as meaningless, while others have charged it with elitism or hermeticism. Yet abstraction does not “depict” things in the conventional sense, and to reduce it to a single mode of practice only adds to the confusion. Painters grouped under the label pursued radically different intentions through distinct methods and processes, rendering “abstraction” an imprecise and often misleading category.

Abstract Expressionism emerged in mid-20th-century America as a heterogeneous movement, and Mark Rothko (1903–70) came to be regarded as one of its central figures. Yet even this term proves inadequate. Rothko rejected the label “Abstract Expressionist,” and especially the designation “abstract,” which he saw as obscuring his concern with a reality beyond the physical world. As he put it, “I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It’s really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.” What is at stake here is not formal categorization, but a response to a modern condition of isolation and spiritual deprivation.

From Form to Spirit: Rothko’s Mature Vision

Having moved through expressionist distortion, Surrealism, and a “multiform” phase in the 1940s, Rothko arrived at his mature style by the late 1940s. This phase went beyond aesthetic innovation or dialogue with tradition. His paintings, he insisted, were “human dramas,” often tragic in implication, grounded in the inescapable fact of human mortality. Beauty, understood as a conventional aesthetic goal, was irrelevant. Rothko’s aim was not the beautiful, but the truth of spiritual experience.

For this reason, the charge that his work is elitist or hermetic fails to account for his intentions. Rothko conceived his paintings as presences—works meant to be encountered with empathy and openness. In this sense, they are social rather than exclusionary. Although he stripped away many pictorial conventions, including illusionistic space, figuration, and traditional figure-ground relations, he retained elements capable of crossing cultural boundaries. Brooding dark hues and blacks evoke mortality, while softly shifting fields of color create a sense of movement and instability. Through these means, Rothko sought to create a space in which emotion could be enacted in painting and reactivated in the viewer, provoking what he called “basic human emotions.”

The poet Stanley Kunitz, a close friend of the artist, described Rothko as a “shaman” whose art had its origins in magic and was inherently ethical and spiritual. While not Rothko’s own language, the description captures something essential: his abandonment of traditional conventions signals a desire to return to the beginnings of human expression. For Rothko himself, the spiritual was not an ancillary concern but the prime goal of his work.

The Limits of Language in Modern Art

By the mid-20th century, a current in literary criticism and modern art privileged the artwork itself over the so-called “heresy of paraphrase,” the belief that description inevitably mutilates the work it seeks to explain. From Russian Formalism to English New Criticism, skepticism toward the sufficiency of critical language gained traction, and many Abstract Expressionists shared this view. Rothko was among those who doubted that words could do anything but distort the experience of art.

For this reason, Abstract Expressionist works were often deemed uninterpretable by both supporters and detractors. As interpretation belongs to the linguistic, it was widely held to be incommensurable with other art forms. Writing later, Jean-François Lyotard would argue that verbalizing art amounts to ideology, since the true artistic experience lies beyond words.

Beyond Words

In Rothko’s late work, however, the failure of language is not merely inevitable but desired. Just as his paintings negate figuration and the objects of the visible world, they also expose the insufficiency of description, whose referents remain tied to the physical realm he sought to transcend. Description, with its habits of categorization and comparison, runs counter to Rothko’s aim of a universal sublimity freed from linguistic constraint. His paintings, he insisted, were to be encountered as pure “presences,” living as organic forms rather than as images to be decoded.

This resistance to explanation was shared by other modernists. The sculptor David Smith spoke of his work as a “return to origins, before purities were befouled by words,” and Rothko similarly warned that explanation causes a “paralysis of the mind and imagination.” Such paralysis, he feared, did not only afflict the artist who explains, but also the viewer, whose freedom of response might be compromised by preconception.

The Power of Presence

Rothko’s aversion to fixed meaning was shaped in part by a broader postwar context. After the Second World War, illusionistic realism had become associated with propaganda through its use by Nazi and Soviet regimes, while even Social Realism was viewed with suspicion. Against this backdrop, Rothko developed a horror of particularized meanings being imposed on his work. The viewer’s autonomy was paramount, even if it remained guided by the paintings’ emotional and spiritual evocations.

The resulting “poverty” of language, asserted by Rothko and embodied in the silent presences of his late paintings, renders them effectively unwritable and uninterpretable. Their frequent lack of titles, or reliance on color alone, reinforces this refusal of linguistic mediation. What is not at stake in these brooding, delicately shifting forms is a determinate meaning that can be rendered in prose. Yet this does not imply an absence of communication. Though they represent no narratives, figures, or objects, the fact of the canvas, its colors, and the moods they evoke remains undeniable—if ultimately indefinable.

Language and Rothko

Despite its limits, language can still criticize, analyze, and contextualize art—tasks to which it is endemic. What it cannot do, however, is articulate the total experience of visual art, and least of all Rothko’s painting. Even ekphrasis, developed in the Renaissance to describe artworks, could never fully convey effect or response. Description is by nature partial and therefore limiting.

This limitation is more acute in abstraction. While analysis can trace relationships and developments between works, Rothko’s paintings ultimately stand in self-evidence: they resist exhaustive description and can only be minimally indexed. Rothko himself opposed the imposition of literary interpretation on his work, though he did make occasional statements that clarified his intentions. In 1947, as he approached his mature style, he expressed a sense of confinement within American society, which he believed was hostile to art as a vehicle of true liberation. The transcendental experience he saw as art’s mission, he argued, had been marginalized by consumerism and could only be recovered by abandoning the security of the familiar.

Tragedy, Mortality, and the Transcendent

For Rothko, preconceptions were obstacles to authenticity. He described them as “the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur,” a necessary threshold for both artistic process and viewer reception. His paintings, he insisted, were “dramas,” with shapes acting as performers—organic forms endowed with volition and passion, unburdened by the “finite associations” of the visible world.

Two tragic conditions animate this vision. The first is the modern loss of the transcendental, resulting in what Rothko called human incommunicability. The second is the tragic fact of human mortality. His paintings confront both: they affirm existence while proposing vast, seemingly limitless spaces meant to intuit spiritual eternity.

The late works were conceived as communal encounters with this boundless spirituality. Rothko even specified an intimate viewing distance—18 inches—so that the paintings might envelop the viewer. This impulse culminated in the Rothko Chapel, where the viewer is physically encircled by the works. Far from elitist or exclusionary, Rothko intended a universal address, seeking what he called “an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”

Although abstract in their refusal of depiction and narrative, the paintings are not meaningless. Rothko avoided symbols, which he saw as bound to language, and instead sought to register “basic human emotions” as directly as possible through color and shape. Yet the works point beyond the artist’s own emotions. They demand the engagement of a “sensitive” viewer—since, as Rothko put it, “a picture lives by companionship”—and they attempt an alchemy of experience. Ordinary materials are transformed into luminous, indeterminate spaces that strain against definition, offering, however briefly, an encounter in which finitude itself seems to be overcome.

Intention and Impact

From the 1930s onward, Clement Greenberg dominated mid-century art criticism. An anti-intentionalist, he argued that only the completed painting mattered, not the artist’s intent. While Greenberg’s ideas became orthodoxy, they still offer valuable insights.

Rothko, though sparing in words, explicitly aimed to express “basic human emotions.” Unlike the High Modernists, who rejected intention entirely, Rothko’s late paintings not only demand that they be looked at, as Greenberg insisted, but also engage the observer, erasing the distance implied by pure visual contemplation.

Rothko’s approach resonates with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist view that meaning resides in the spectator’s engagement rather than the artist’s intent. Yet Rothko extends this further: his works are simultaneously records of his own confrontation with the sublime and invitations to the receptive viewer, whom he called his ideal “sensitive” observer, to partake in the experience.

In this way, Rothko’s paintings balance intention and reception, making the viewer both spectator and confidante, co-participant in the emotional and spiritual encounter.

Color and the Sublime

In 1948, Barnett Newman argued that European art failed to reach the sublime due to its “blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation.” This resonates with Rothko, whose color fields pursue an unnameable sense of the sublime, beyond figurative or conceptual content.

Rothko subtly modulated tones across works—bright greens and reds, contrasting darks, later nuanced dark hues—creating an “oceanic vision” bounded only by the frame, which marks both the threshold between everyday reality and spiritual space, and between the sensibilities of artist and viewer.

Art historian Claude Cernuschi observed that the relationships in a Rothko painting exist as much in the spectator’s mind as on the canvas, echoing techniques seen in Impressionism. For Rothko, the canvas itself and its paint are objects to be transcended, evoking human emotion directly through color and light: “it’s not color, it’s light.”

From Painting as Act to Painting as Presence

Harold Rosenberg described action painting as “the act itself is the object,” a notion that applies to Pollock but not to Rothko. For Rothko, painting is the start of a process, not its end. His late works are “pure presences,” inviting viewers into both the painting and their own encounter with the transcendent, often within the tragic awareness of mortality.

While Rothko shares with Sartre a concern for authenticity, he diverges conceptually. Sartre’s nothingness negates being; Rothko negates appearances to evoke spiritual reality. Figure-ground distinctions are irrelevant—each painting becomes both “ground” and quasi-subjective “figure,” facilitating communion with the intangible.

Critics Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit note that from the 1950s onward, Rothko “subverted the readability of forms,” culminating in the Rothko Chapel. Visibility is superseded by the visionary: organic, volitional shapes move and grow as the viewer engages, transforming the act of looking into holistic participation rather than isolated perception.

Rothko and Spiritual Reality

Jeffrey Weiss links Rothko to Sartre’s notion of “double nihilation”: the absent figure experienced as presence, where plenitude serves as ground. Yet this framing misrepresents Rothko. He does not negate being, only the appearances of the physical world, producing communion with something spiritually real and intangible. In this respect, he aligns more closely with Platonism than with existentialism, privileging spiritual reality over nothingness.

Bersani and Dutoit describe Rothko as “retrogressive,” returning to the moment of looking, yet in his paintings, presence is palpable. Composed of “organic” and “volitional” shapes, these works grow and move as they are viewed. Rather than depicting objects, Rothko’s canvases engender holistic experiences of the organic presences they embody, guiding the viewer toward the visionary and sublime.

Bibliography

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000.

President Ford didn’t actually say “Drop Dead” to the city of New York in 1975, but it didn’t matter—the city was suffering, and there wasn’t going to be much help from the federal government. In the Bronx, landlords burned down their own buildings for insurance money, basic utilities and services suffered as city workers went on strike, and crime and police corruption were rampant. But none of this precluded artists from living and working in the city and ultimately creating art that showcased both the city’s heaven and hell.

1. Thomas Struth

A scholarship brought Thomas Struth to New York in December 1977, and he called it “a life changing experience.” He found the city “very intimidating and scary. For the first two weeks, I could hardly speak, I was so shocked by it.” With money from his parents to purchase equipment, he set out with his 5×7 camera to “photograph the streets, and hope that they might reveal their nature.” Ruefully, on the first day, he was “immediately attacked by homeless, drunk guys.” He also recalled: “I had no money for taxis, so I carried everything by foot and on the subway.”

Traveling the length and width of the island, Struth captured street scenes from the Financial District to Harlem, Chelsea to the United Nations Plaza. The images were shot in the early morning to avoid sharp contrasts between shadow and light, infusing them with a documentary, dispassionate quality. Crosby Street, SoHo, New York is one of the most iconic in the series, its depiction of dereliction striking to contemporary viewers used to the area’s luxury boutiques and expensive restaurants.

2. David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz was drawn to the Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, seeing himself in the poet’s impassioned pursuit of an art that infused all aspects of one’s life. Other similarities are even more striking: both men were openly gay, experienced periods of impoverishment and vagrancy, were enfants terribles of their respective scenes of New York and Paris, and died tragically at the same age of 37.

Wojnarowciz turned his interest into art. The series Rimbaud in New York, first printed in Soho Weekly News in 1980, encompasses several hundred photographs. In each, a slender male figure (Wojnarowicz called on several friends to model for him while he remained behind his borrowed camera) with a paper mask of Rimbaud affixed to his head appears in both public and private spaces of the city. The images are liberating in their presentation of queerness, but the city life they depict is also often lonely or discomfiting.

Rimbaud shoots up, has sex, holds a gun to his head, haunts the gay cruising grounds of the West Side Piers, and stands in dark shadows, isolated and always wearing the same inscrutable expression. In the piece above, Rimbaud is in Times Square. In the 1970s and 1980s, the area was far from the Disneyfied playground for tourists and theatergoers that it is today. It was sordid and sketchy, filled with porn theaters, peep shows, video stores, and grungy diners. Rolling Stone called 42nd Street “the sleaziest block in America” in 1981, but for Wojnarowicz and other artists, it was a site of constant aesthetic fascination.

3. Camilo Jose Vergara

Camilo Jose Vergara Vergara arrived in New York from Chile at the beginning of the decade, enrolling in a sociology program at Columbia University in 1970. When he moved to New York, he gravitated toward Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side, where he began taking photos that would eventually form the Old New York (1970-1973) series of which Duane Street is a part.

Vergara is perhaps best known for his Tracking Time series, in which he revisits the same places in a city—storefronts, residences, libraries, train stations—over the years, chronicling their evolution or erosion. He says: “I’m really interested in issues, what replaces what, what’s the thrust of things. Photographers don’t usually get at that—they want to show you one frozen image that you find amazing. For me, the more pictures the better.”

The Old New York series includes images of children playing, burnt-out cars and piles of debris, movie theaters and bodegas, painted brick walls, political posters, chatting neighbors, and vestiges of the built environment and modes of living that were quickly vanishing (in one photograph, a man is driving a horse and cart, seemingly his primary mode of conveyance. In another, the two World Trade Center towers are in the process of being built, looming over the older portions of the neighborhood). The series gives the viewers a look at a city undergoing a profound transformation, whether from the wrecking ball, patterns of immigration, city policies, or cultural shifts.

4. Tseng Kwong Chi

Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and immigrated with his parents and sister to Vancouver, Canada. As a young man, he studied in Paris at the Academie Julian and eventually made his way to New York in 1978, settling in among the downtown art scene. In the city, Chi formed relationships with luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel. He also became Keith Haring’s official photo-chronicler. Like too many other gay men in New York in the 1980s, Chi died young from complications due to AIDS.

Chi’s East Meets West series features the artist in black-and-white standing before iconic tourist sites such as Disneyland, the London Bridge, and the Grand Canyon. In New York, he posed before the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center towers, the Empire State Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge, all while wearing dark sunglasses and a classic Mao suit.

Even though he lived in the “grungy” part of New York, his photos showed the more glamorous places that still drew tourists (despite a 1975 NYPD-issued pamphlet entitled Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to New York). He genuinely celebrated the city’s famous historical, architectural, and cultural sites while offering a subtly humorous commentary on the relationship between insider/outsider.

5. Christy Rupp

In the summer of 1979, it seemed like rats ran the city of New York. A three-week strike by tugboat operators and another by apartment maintenance workers meant the streets were filled with rotting mountains of garbage. Over 130 buildings were declared menaces to public health, and the Board of Health Director warned of “a perilous increase in rodent and insect infestation.” Reports of higher rates of rat bites filled news reports. A woman was reportedly attacked by rats in downtown Manhattan one night, only escaping from the swarm by jumping into her car.

Christy Rupp, a young “eco-artist,” as she labeled herself, had officially settled in the city in the summer of 1977. During the sanitation strike, she was living on Fulton Street and saw firsthand how the conditions made by humans emboldened the rats to defend what they saw as their space.

In Rat Patrol, Rupp took one of the ubiquitous posters from a subway car sanitation ad, which featured a lifesize photo of a rat, disturbing facts about its behavior, and a concluding warning in bold that exhorted the viewer to “Starve a Rat Today” by being careful with their garbage. Rupp had the rat photo offset-printed and began, as she recalled, “pasting these up as a way to mark areas that were infested, so people could avoid walking through dangerous areas in which rats were defending their territories.” She did not want to “defend rats…[but] point out how we had created a habitat for them, and they would naturally occupy it.”

6. Fab Five Freddy

Fab Five Freddy, born Fred Braithwaite in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was one of the most revered street artists of the 1970s and 1980s, decorating walls and subway cars with his signature style. He became deeply interested in art in college, particularly admiring the Pop artists, many of whom he would soon become friends with. He said of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1991: “Andy was the biggest influence on me. I hung around with him as much as I could. For me and Jean-Michel [Basquiat], coming from where we were coming from, being young black males in this happening downtown scene, we were just operating on another planet, and Andy was it.”

Freddy’s most famous work is arguably the Campbell’s Soup train, which debuted in early 1980 and ran for several years. A collaboration with friend and fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones, the train features eight soup cans, some referencing past art movements such as Dada and Pop Art, with others featuring versions of Freddy’s name. Lee and Freddy, along with a few friends helping spray, worked quickly in the night, racing against the dripping of the paint in the cold air, the fumes in the tunnel, and the ever-present threat of the train moving or the police finding them. Painting a subway car was a surefire way to get your work noticed. It was also a way to show that art did not need to be on a canvas to be art. It could be embedded in the fabric of the city itself.

7. Peter Hujar

By the 1970s, the West Side piers were crumbling, derelict, and dangerous. The diminishing of commercial shipping after WWII left them unused and prone to rot and decay. The collapse of a portion of the West Side Highway in 1973 further sealed them off from the rest of the city. But these modern ruins did not stay abandoned for long, as they attracted young people, many of them unhoused, as well as artists and gay men.

There, under the sun with the waters of the Hudson below them, men could sunbathe and carouse. In the dark, dank halls and holes of the pier edifices, they could cruise, fornicate, and watch. Art historian Douglas Crimp, who visited the piers in their heyday, remembered that “the abandoned and dilapidated industrial piers presented extraordinary opportunities for experimentation and mischief.”

It was a utopia of sorts in a period before AIDS, a site of sexual and personal liberation. David Wojnarowciz said of them: “What I loved about [the piers] was that they were about as far away from civilization as I could walk, and I really loved that sense of detachment. It was like sitting with the entire city at your back and looking across the river.” However, the piers were also dangerous, with criminals preying on people otherwise occupied and “gay bashers” spoiling for a fight—and, of course, the piers themselves were in many cases literally crumbling into the water.

Peter Hujar captured both the human visitors and the atrophying structures they frequented, finding a sordid beauty even amid the ruins. In Hallway, Canal Street Pier from 1983, the walls and roof peel away, and the floor is covered with debris, but the hallway and the doorways beckon with the promise of privacy. The light streaming from the open roof has an almost spiritual tone. Hujar’s photos are of a place that would not last much longer. Even beyond the obvious decay captured in the images, it is clear that this isolated, utopian space was not fated for forever.

8. Perla de Leon

While many parts of the city were suffering in the 1970s, the Bronx was a special case. Block after block, the borough was filled with crumbling and burned-out buildings, piles of debris, abandoned cars, and boarded-up windows. Whereas popular narratives of the time blamed its blight on the working-class, mostly Black and Brown, residents, it was the city’s “urban renewal” policies and greedy landlords who were responsible for the destruction.

The South Bronx was slated as an “Enterprise Zone,” meaning the city encouraged factories to move in and said they would give their owners tax incentives to do so. Normally, the destruction of buildings would be accomplished with wrecking balls and demo crews, but the city looked the other way as landlord-arsonists did the work instead. The Bronx was burning, as the common refrain went.

However, De Leon’s 1979-1980 photographic project of the Bronx, South Bronx Spirit, was not about the burning. She had grown up in Hamilton Heights, Harlem, and was drawn to the South Bronx while working with a grammar school as part of a grant program (she taught children pin-hole photography with shoe boxes since there was no equipment at the school). With her own camera, she captured the people who lived in the neighborhood, showing how the fires were not the defining feature of their existence.

She said in an interview: “Everyone has captured the fires as they would happen. It was always in the news. It didn’t interest me as much. You can see it, obviously, in the background and in the photographs, but I wanted to show more of the life that was there. I feel that my photographs capture the spirit of the kids. For me, it’s just resilience.”

9. Alvin Baltrop

Like Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop was a frequent perambulator of the piers. He had taken up photography as a young man. After a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War, he made his way back to New York, where he had been born in 1948. As a queer man himself, the piers beckoned with their seemingly unfettered freedom. He purchased a moving truck and used it as a mobile developing lab and a place to live while photographing Pier 52.

His thousands of images captured the place’s allure as well as the pitfalls of this ruin on the outskirts of civilization—languid sunbathers in front of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Days End, a work of art that consisted of large cuts into the walls and ceilings of the pier; police standing over a dead body that had been fished out of the water; naked men embracing, posing, sleeping, and cruising; the piers themselves, rotting, crumbling, sinking into the river.

Baltrop did not attain the same sort of recognition as other chroniclers of the pier, his images often being seen as too inclined to the lewd or tawdry. It was not until after his death that his body of work emerged as a powerful and empathetic chronicle of gay life before AIDS decimated the community and of city spaces before they were cleaned up and homogenized.

Sergio Bessa of the Brooklyn Museum sees Baltrop’s work as “diaristic,” but “maybe unbeknownst to him, there was an idea of an archive, of documentation. I don’t know if at the time he was aware of that, but now you look back and you have this unbelievable archive of those piers.” Baltrop himself commented: “Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur [and] soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time.”

10. Hiram Maristany

Hiram Maristany was born and raised in New York to parents who had migrated to the city from Puerto Rico. His beloved neighborhood was East Harlem, or El Barrio, and it was there as a young man that he met like-minded young activists and became part of the Young Lords Party. He remained an integral part of the Nuyorican (Puerto Ricans living in New York) political and cultural movement in the 1970s, lending his photography skills to chronicle the Garbage Offensive and the occupation of the First Spanish United Methodist Church. A founding member and eventually the director of El Museo del Barrio, Maristany was deeply committed to using his camera and his curatorial and community-organizing skills to celebrate the arts of his people.

His photographs are documentary in nature, capturing the everyday realities of life in El Barrio. The neighborhood was a poor one, and the images of it that tended to circulate in the media were often voyeuristic and one-dimensional. While Maristany wanted to show the difficulties of the neighborhood, he also wanted to show the real people who lived, played, and worked there.

Maristany said in 2021: “One of the things that I had to deal with as a young man was that all the images depicting Puerto Ricans were negative. We were either committing a crime or a crime was being perpetrated against us. We were always in handcuffs. Our sisters were depicted as teenage mothers—without any morals or ethics. I was very distressed and angry about it. I wanted to try and do something about it.”

Our fascination with vampires goes back a long way, before they became the standard fare of Halloween costumes and campy melodrama. Several cultures across the globe have a folkloric tradition surrounding undead, human-like creatures who prey on human blood. In 19th-century Europe, the idea of vampirism gained popular currency as a metaphor for various kinds of insidious influence. At the same time, the cartoonish image of the vampire was brought to prominence in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Since then, vampires have only gone from strength to strength.

Vampires in Folklore

There are versions of vampiric creatures in the folklore of cultures across all the continents. West Africa has the tree-dwelling Sasabonsam, which feeds on humans passing through forests; Madagascar has the ramanga, which specifically drinks the blood of nobles. The Aztecs believed in Cihuateteo, spirits of women who died in childbirth, who might steal the spirits of children. Many cultures across North, Central, and South America believe in the chupacabra, a vampiric cryptid that preys on livestock. The Mandrurgo, in the folklore of the Philippines, appears as a beautiful young woman by day, but sucks men’s blood by night.

In fact, blood-sucking demons feature in just about every ancient mythology: the fear they encapsulate is perennial, though the form they take shifts with time and place. But the version of the vampire which conquered the novel, starting in the 19th century, was a variation on Slavic folklore which began to spread early in the 18th century.

These vampires were undead people, the inspirited corpses of those who had lived evil lives or been buried in unconsecrated ground. They often appeared in their shrouds, their mouths dripping, their bodies ruddy and bloated from feasting on blood. One bite from them could turn healthy, living people into vampires, too. Most features of the folkloric vampire’s appearance relate to concerns about burying the dead safely, respectfully, and—crucially—for good. They reflect a culture’s fears about what might happen if the dead refuse to stay buried.

Vampires in Romanticism

Folklore concerning vampires in places such as Bulgaria and Romania mostly spread orally until the 18th century, when ethnographers began to record folk traditions in writing. One important, if sometimes under-acknowledged, strain of the Romantic movement in literature was its authors’ interest in folk traditions, excavating material for their tales from sources beyond those which had previously kept writers busy: Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible. These authors also benefited from the opportunity to travel more extensively than many of their forebears, encountering these stories firsthand and carrying them home.

Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), inspired by the poet’s travels in Portugal and encounters with ancient Islamic tales, includes a sinister vampiric spirit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who traveled and shared ideas with Southey, wove vampirism into his poem Christabel (1816). The innocent title character is preyed upon by the mysterious Geraldine, who cannot pass certain thresholds and is averse to Christian prayer.

Lord Byron‘s The Giaour (1813), with a similar Orientalist slant to Southey’s Thalaba, describes vampires as those “rent” from their tombs, who haunt the place where they died and suck the blood of those left there. But Byron was to have an even more important role in bringing the vampire into popular culture—not as a poet, but as a character himself.

During the infamous gathering of Romantics at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron’s physician John Polidori wrote a novella called The Vampyre. The storytelling contest that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also led to Polidori’s tale about a mysterious, charming aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, who corrupts everyone he encounters. Ruthven’s powers are indiscriminate: he will prey on any impressionable young woman or man, and will not stop until he has drained their blood.

Polidori’s story conspicuously blends elements of the Eastern European folk character with elements previously absent from any tales about vampires, such as the vampire’s high social status and charisma—elements which recall Byron himself. Whether this is because The Vampyre drew on Byron’s own, unfinished story from the Villa Diodati contest, or because Polidori envisioned Byron as (socially, at least) a kind of vampire, Polidori’s version of the vampire had a decisively transformative effect on subsequent depictions of the vampire.

Penny Dreadfuls and Sensation Fiction

In mid-19th-century Europe, novels and magazines took hold of the literary market thanks to new printing technologies—and vampires took part in this takeover. Readers were gaining a taste for sensational, Gothic horror, and penny dreadfuls (the name for novels serialized in cheap magazines) satisfied their appetites.

Varney the Vampire (1845-47) takes up the two strains of vampirism in Polidori’s novel: the literal vampire, who sucks blood to stay alive (or, more accurately, undead), and the metaphorical vampire, who drains their victim of their lifeblood in more figurative ways.

Varney is another aristocratic vampire. In taking a once-wealthy family as his victims, Varney prefigures Stoker’s Dracula, a destitute nobleman who craves a return to his former glory—a financial vampire. Varney is also the first fictional vampire to have an important iconographical feature: fangs.

Thrillers and sensation novels gave readers insight into the vampire’s motives, even transforming the malign figure of folklore into a sympathetic creature who is in thrall to their instincts. In Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the protagonist, a mixed-race woman who has grown up in Jamaica, discovers with horror that her influence over others is fatal. The title unexpectedly turns our attention away from the blood of the victims to that of the vampire, blending the Gothic tradition with prevalent (and generally racist) late-19th-century ideas about miscegenation and degeneration.

The bestselling sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon similarly put a scientific spin on the vampire’s obsession with blood in Good Lady Ducayne (1896). Despite the sinister bat hovering in the illustration on the title page, this novel features a distinctly medical vampire, who drains her victims’ blood through a combination of chloroform and transfusion, after engaging their help in her experiment to prolong her life as long as possible. The novel eerily echoes the vampiric undertones that linger in medicine and beauty treatments today.

The Emergence of the Gothic

While the 19th century saw the vampire take on forms far beyond its folkloric incarnation, the most popular and enduring vampires in fiction from this time are the literal ones, who come forth from unquiet graves to suck the blood of innocent victims. Their refusal to stay dead, their dealings in darkness, their part-human monstrosity, and their inexplicably seductive hold over their victims made vampires a key feature of the Gothic genre.

By the second half of the century, Gothic novels as a form often featured a story within a story, or stories cobbled together out of various modes such as letters, newspaper fragments, and documents. This was particularly effective in stories about vampires, heightening the sense of the vampire as an elusive, uncontainable figure whom no amount of description or taxonomization, by whichever narratorial authority, can capture.

Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu uses this multi-layered narrative to enclose the firsthand testimony of a woman seduced by a female vampire inside a pseudoscientific casebook. Le Fanu wants the reader to imagine that this vampire might really have existed, while conveying at the same time the force of her seduction.

Carmilla is one of the most seductive vampires in literature. What was a latent homoeroticism in the relationship between Christabel and Gertrude in Coleridge’s Christabel becomes, here, overt. Carmilla openly caresses her victim and mounts her like a succubus, the mythological female demon who seduces men in their sleep. Only, unlike the succubus who drinks men’s bodily fluids to survive, Christabel sucks the blood of another woman.

Carmilla, along with earlier novels such as The Vampyre and Varney the Vampire, was an influence on the most famous vampire novel of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In all of these stories, the vampire comes from an ancient, noble line, reflecting dual anxieties: inside the noble families, an anxiety about the purity of their bloodline, and outside them, an anxiety about their power over lower-born people. The vampire’s restricted movements and desire to infuse their bodies with the blood of others encode concerns about social mobility in a fast-changing world.

Dracula satisfies the reader’s desire to encounter a truly Gothic villain while connecting this villain to deeper contemporary concerns. Less overt than Carmilla with its homoerotic vampirism, Dracula nonetheless tapped into debates of the day about gender and sexuality, especially through its representations of Lucy Westenra, who falls prey to Dracula’s charms, and Mina Harker, a resourceful heroine who has attracted much feminist discussion. With Dracula, the vampire’s conquest of the novel was complete, and it soon began to transcend the pages of fiction.

Vampires in Art

By the early 20th century, the word ‘vampire’ was being shortened to ‘vamp’ to refer to alluring, but dangerous, women. Although the most prominent vampires in fiction thus far had been male, a trope surrounding female vampires emerged in visual culture, taking its cue from the seductive charms of Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the Brides of Dracula in Stoker’s novel.

Images of deadly vampiric women were also inspired by the 19th-century trope of the femme fatale. In Victorian Britain, changes in women’s legal status and repeated attempts to regulate the sex work industry brought about heightened fears of female sexuality. While unbridled female sexuality has been a perennial source of anxiety in cultures across the globe, it took center stage in mid- to late-19th-century art.

Félicien Rops frequently depicted insatiable devil-women in Gothic scenes blending sexual ecstasy with death, destruction, and the Black Mass. Rops creates a similar ambiguity to Stoker in the character of Lucy Westenra, as to how voluntarily these women have surrendered to vampiric lust.

Rops was inspired, as were many artists of the period, by the decadent movement and its early practitioner, the poet Charles Baudelaire. Les fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire’s notorious volume of poetry, included several poems about femmes fatales, and even one titled ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire.’ This poem, featuring a “putrescent thing, all faceless and exuding pus,” who drains the speaker of his “very marrow,” was censored from Les fleurs du mal after attracting the outraged attention of the French censors.

Along with five other censored poems, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire’ was published in Belgium in 1866 in a volume titled Les épaves (‘scraps’ or ‘wreckage’), with a frontispiece by Rops depicting a skeleton emerging triumphantly from a wasteland.

Edvard Munch‘s 1895 painting Love and Pain has often been known by an alternative title (not used by the painter himself), Vampire. While ostensibly showing merely a woman kissing a man on his neck, her consuming embrace and flowing, flame-colored hair connote the kinds of dangerous sexuality that preoccupied so many contemporary artists.

Munch repeatedly returned to the image of the scarlet-haired seductress whose red vitality might, it seems, come from draining the blood of her lovers, culminating in the painting Vampire in the Forest (1924-25). He explicitly related this motif in his work to the changing social role of women with the advent of feminism: “it became the woman who seduces and entices and deceives the man […] In the transition period, the man became the weaker one.”

In Britain, too, artists responded to women’s emancipation by revamping the longstanding image of the female blood-sucker. Several Pre-Raphaelite artists dealt with women’s power in their work by representing demonic or magical female figures from myth and legend: witches, enchantresses, sirens, and vampires.

This reflected the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in Romantic poetry. Painters took inspiration from Coleridge’s Christabel, Byron’s Giaour, and two poems by John Keats about seductive women. The first, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ depicts a fairy-like woman who drains the spirit of every man she meets. In the second, ‘Lamia,’ the female character, like the vampire-like creatures in several world cultures, seeks to consume children.

Edward Burne-Jones painted several dangerous women, from mermaids and sirens to the Arthurian seductresses Morgan le Fay and Nimue. But it was his son, Philip Burne-Jones, who would paint a work titled The Vampire in 1897, inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name.

Burne-Jones’s painting resembles one from a century earlier, Henry Fuseli‘s The Nightmare, in staging a bedroom scene of fearful seduction—only now the roles have been switched. The woman in Fuseli’s painting, preyed upon by an incubus, becomes the succubus of Burne-Jones’s. Kipling’s poem, along with Burne-Jones’s painting, inspired a 1913 silent film called The Vampire, marking the triumphant entrance of the vampire onto the big screen.

Vampires on Screen

Appropriately enough, vampires on screen have refused to die, in spite of attempts to vanquish them. In 1922, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, sued the makers of the groundbreaking horror film Nosferatu because of its similarity to Dracula. These are substantial: a young man is sent to Transylvania to meet a mysterious client, and scion of a distinguished old family, who is looking to purchase a home in England. Count Orlok—as he is renamed in Nosferatu—sleeps in a coffin, becomes ravenous at the sight of blood, and is intent on claiming the protagonist’s love interest as his own.

One key difference that F.W. Murnau’s film introduced into the genre is the vampire’s susceptibility to sunlight, which in Dracula is dangerous but not fatal. Moreover, Nosferatu set the tone for the visual representations of vampires that would delight audiences for the next century.

Although the court found in Florence Stoker’s favor and ordered all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed, the film survived, and it was too late to stop the spread of Dracula adaptations. The novel has always been in the public domain in the United States due to a copyright error, leading to hundreds of Draculas in film and television.

Each incarnation of Dracula has brought a new angle to the vampire, though elements of the original folklore, Polidori’s Byron-inspired novella, and Stoker’s novel have remained intact throughout.

Béla Lugosi in 1931 and Christopher Lee in 1958 played Dracula as a suave aristocrat, often garbed in white tie beneath his bat-like cape, his brooding mouth hiding sharp fangs. Gary Oldman’s portrayal, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), departed from the now-traditional costume and brought in elements of the steampunk aesthetic.

Film and television have explored the plot and characters of Dracula and the broader vampire myth from every possible angle. Vampires roam the dystopian streets of a post-virus New York in I Am Legend (2007); they pose as a wealthy couple in order to prey on a sleep doctor in The Hunger (1983); they navigate the pitfalls of eternal life in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); they deal with racism and abuse in New Orleans in Interview with the Vampire (film version 1994, television version 2022 to present).

Other adaptations have taken the perspective of previously sidelined characters who are trying to defeat the vampire, such as the 2004 film Van Helsing and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). Vampires became a staple of young adult fare in books, later adapted for the screen, such as the Twilight series (2008-12) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17).

Thanks to the popularity of the goth subculture since the 1980s, with bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure adopting costumes inspired by Lugosi’s and Lee’s vampires, and the band Bauhaus even releasing a song titled ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead,’ the image of the vampire seems destined to live forever.

When debating whether Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a secret dissident or a full-blood Socialist Realist, it is important to consider the milieu that people in oppressive regimes lived through because we do not share their lived experiences.

Arts in the Socialist Realist Shadow

While most artists like sculptors, painters, and writers had clear “guidelines” from the Russian government, musicians were left to their own devices to figure out the rules. It should be noted that many artists also defied the totalitarian government and had many of their works outright banned. For example, the writer Mikhail Bulgakov knew Stalin personally, but also had many of his works banned.

The rules, called Socialist Realism, were rather simple but draconian and anyone who stepped out of line was denounced or declared an enemy of the state. When portraying life in Soviet Russia, the arts had four core values: (i) art should apply to workers, and be relatable and understandable, (ii) the arts need to represent everyday life, (iii) representations should be realistic (so nothing abstract or unidentifiable), and (iv) art should support the aims of the State and the Party and not undermine it. Maxim Gorky, a favorite of Joseph Stalin, laid down the rules at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. The arts became Stalin’s propaganda machine and made life extremely difficult for artists.

Yet, how does a composer present these idealized ideals in their music? The short answer is to avoid formalism. But what is formalism according to the Communist Party? The main catchwords that defined formalism included atonal and twelve-tone music (pioneered in Arnold Schoenberg’s works), dissonance, and cacophony (associated with Igor Stravinsky, e.g., The Rite of Spring). Music focusing on the formal elements of music rather than the subject was deemed formalist. Most of the musical trends in Western music during the first half of the 20th century were contrary to the ideals of Socialist Realism (Tompkins, 2013). Yet, almost 300 years ago, Imperial Russia underwent a radical change under Peter the Great, who westernized the country and made it a great European state.

Soviet realism can be summarized in the following vague prescript from the Composer’s Union:

“The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength. Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art, against subservience and servility towards modern bourgeois culture…” (Steinpress and Yamplonski, 1966).

It was under these vague instructions that composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich and others had to toe the line and bend their music to the official idioms of Socialist Realism.

It is as if the Nazi and Communist Parties copied each other’s cultural policies towards the arts. In Germany, avant-garde music was degenerate and deplorable. While the Communist Party did not have a single “soundtrack” to epitomize their musical tradition, the Nazis appropriated Richard Wagner’s music as the soundtrack to their fascist German nationalist campaign. Yet, the Communist Party in Russia went a step further and censored all their artists across the board and abused their art to further the Party’s propaganda mission.

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Op. 29 (1934)

Few works in the modern history of Western music have brought so much controversy, (negative) political attention and scrutiny, and bad press to a single composer as Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. 

Despite the storms that would erupt around Shostakovich after the performance of the opera, his life was happy. Until the government began abusing him as a tool and a bad example when the Socialist Realist decrees placed all artists in a near-constant state of fear and jeopardy.

Shostakovich collaborated with Alexander Preis to produce the libretto (read the plot and program notes here). They took inspiration from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella, set in Tsarist Russia. Katerina Izmailova is the titular character who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an older merchant in the countryside. Her life is filled with brutality and repression—women are regarded as the property of men. She engages in adultery and murder to escape her fate, but it is suggested that she commits suicide at the end of the opera when she is marched to a prison camp for her crimes.

Through the orchestra, the composer gives each character a unique voice while also serving as a commentator and narrator throughout the performance. While Katerina’s music is lyrical and melodic her father-in-law is portrayed by abrupt, melody-lacking music. For her husband, Zinovy, Shostakovich uses a wispy alto flute, and her lover, the womanizing Sergei, saccharine music accompanies his singing.

The first major use of the orchestra is during Katerina and Sergei’s first sexual encounter—a can-can is accompanied by suggestive trombone slides simulating the act. This “pornophony”  is perhaps the most lurid and graphic depiction of a sexual act in the history of music and probably landed Shostakovich in more trouble than he could ever imagine. Here, Richard Wagner’s ideas about the orchestra possessing the ability to speak (Sprachvermögen in German) shine through. Another instance is the Priest’s “liturgical chant” that is devoid of humility and spirituality: a poke at his insincerity as a spiritual leader.

Perhaps it was the opera’s thinly veiled messages of crime, passion, repression, and poking fun at the government that broke the camel’s back. The Party adored using Shostakovich’s opera as an example of “bad” music which should be avoided to keep music in line with the prescriptions of Soviet Realism.

Symphony No 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 (1937)

After Stalin left the life-threatening and ill-fated performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936, Shostakovich was on his radar. Lady Macbeth could have ended his career and his life, thus he had to make sure he abided by the Party’s rules regarding Socialist Realism. Additionally, the scathing review in Pravda (the official newspaper of the Communist Party) did not do Dimitri Shostakovich any favors either. His life was hanging in a balance tethered to Stalin’s whims. The Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 was a real threat to anyone who defied Stalin and Shostakovich was no exception.

Yet, the composer did not compose an ode or sycophantic cantata praising the Communist Party and their leader. With his Fifth Symphony, he offered the Party an “apology,” channeling the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, especially in the first two movements and the triumphant last movement. The premiere in November 1937 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) was a roaring success.

Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 is multiple things at once, with as many interpretations as possible. Some think it is a veiled message of giving the finger to Stalin, while others read and hear deep sorrow and finally redemption in its last movement. There is also a train of thought that it is an autobiographical work that personifies Shostakovich’s personal life and how he triumphed over hardship. Of course, there is also a line of thought that suggests the symphony is a satirical portrait of Stalin—exuberance and adulation parading as a hollow shell.

Yet all the qualities that fit into a Socialist Realist composition are present: the musical language is direct, the melodies are well-shaped and memorable, and the positive fanfare in the fourth movement releases all the doubt and tension felt throughout the previous movements. However, the work is suitably complex and serious. After all, it is subtitled “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.” 

In the first two movements, the spirit of Beethoven and especially Mahler looms ever-present. The first movement (at 00:25) offers a magnificent interplay of despair and a call to arms. In the two aforementioned symphonic masters’ style, Shostakovich builds a narrative arc that erupts into a powerful conclusion when the recapitulation occurs. The outcome of the struggle is ambiguous and set aside when the jocular second movement enters.

Like many of Beethoven and his contemporaries’ scherzos, Shostakovich offers a stark contrast to the seriousness of the first movement. The second movement marked Allegretto (at 17:25) sounds like a forced “happy dance” where the tired workers are forced to sound happy and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to society. But there is an ironic sadness woven into the musical fabric, possibly symbolizing the overlords who are there to make sure the workers are “happy” with their lot.

In the third movement (at 23:28) Shostakovich eschews the brass section in favor of introspective string writing filled with a range of emotions. It seems as if the hero has lost all hope and is praying for death to release him from his struggles. Melancholic melodies in the flute and oboe add to the tragic feeling hanging over this movement.

Finally, in the fourth movement (at 38:15) the brass section is back in full force with the timpani pounding away. However, the hero is not completely safe from the world’s onslaughts. Yet. The music becomes frenzied and almost cacophonous, but Shostakovich does not dare enter that realm. With a Mahlerian twist the key signature shifts from D minor to D major to have the hero emerge (at 48:56) triumphantly. Yet, it sounds (and feels) like an ironic and pyrrhic victory.

Despite adhering to the classical tradition while sprinkled with avant-garde elements, Shostakovich took huge liberties and chances in this symphony. He won over the Communist Party and showed that he was “rehabilitated” according to their standards again. Nevertheless, there are moments filled with Western formalist tendencies such as dissonance, modernism, and biting, ironic sarcasm throughout the work.

This symphony’s power lies in its rich emotional language and carefully crafted structure. Given its historical context, the symphony transcends place and time. The symphony evokes powerful emotions in the listener while it showcases the human spirit’s will to survive.

Song of the Forests, Op. 81 (1949)

In the Song of the Forests, a different side of Shostakovich emerges: a composer who is toeing the line to please the Party. The work was composed during the summer of 1949 to celebrate the reforestation of the Russian steppes after World War II carved a destructive path across the country. This was part of Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” This was also the world’s first state-sanctioned plan against human-induced climate change. At its core, Stalin’s plan was conservative. Restoring“an imagined prehistoric state, but soon a group of radical scientists advancing untested silvicultural theories managed to take control” (Brain, 2010), and subsequently it derailed after Stalin died in 1953.

The text, by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, praises Stalin as the “Great Gardener” feeding into Stalin’s many accomplishments and his personality cult. After Stalin’s passing, those references were erased from the text. Of course, the Party loved the work and awarded the Stalin Prize to Dmitri Shostakovich in 1950 for his patriotic effort.

The oratorio is divided into seven movements:

• When the War Was Over (0:41)
• The Call Rings Throughout the Land: Let Us Dress Our Land in Forests (07:03)
• Memory of the Past (10:14)
• The Pioneers Plant the Forests (19:43)
• The Fighters of Stalingrad Forge Onward (22:18)
• A Walk into the Future (25:53)
• Glory (34:02)

When comparing this oratorio to Shostakovich’s other compositions, it may seem overly simplistic and Party-pleasing. However, the circumstances and context of the time are important.

In 1948, the government denounced Dmitri Shostakovich along with other composers (again) as formalists who undermined the government’s Socialist Realist policies. Playing by the rules was the name of the game—but those rules were arbitrary and applied at a whim. One day, the government would praise an artist, but the next day you could be denounced. The rules were never applied fairly or with consistency.

String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 (1960)

Among Shostakovich’s output, few works have so many extra- and inter-musical interpretations as the Eighth String Quartet. Some believe it is purely autobiographical. Others say it is a dedication to the victims of fascism worldwide: it is inscribed, “In memory of victims of fascism and war,” after all… Solomon Volkov in his book, Testimony, filled with purported “recollections” by Dmitry Shostakovich himself claims the work is not about fascism. It is the composer’s struggles against the totalitarian Stalinist government, parading as a masked personal critique to avoid official retribution from the government (again).

The version below is from Boris Barshai’s arrangement of the quartet as a chamber symphony. It is cast in four movements as opposed to the original quartet’s five movements.

The first movement opens with Shostakovich’s musical signature D-(eS)-C-H, written in the German style: D-E-flat (S)-C-B (H) k—the same system Johann Sebastian Bach used to write his name B-A-C-H.

Overall, the mood is elegiac and depressing. The DSCH theme was used previously and notably in his Tenth Symphony in E minor, Op. 93. Other themes include one from his Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10—the work that brought him national prominence and a descending theme in the first violin referring to his Fifth Symphony in D minor, Op. 47. The latter work “redeemed” him in 1937 following the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

As austere as the first movement is, the second movement, marked Allegro molto, is like a live wire lashing about with stressful and anguished energy. It is a Blitzkrieg attack, shattering the mood with variations on the DSCH theme by using varying note lengths.

The sudden shift at 06:05 after the violoncello’s struggling upward surge can be heard in his Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67’s last movement. Albeit with more clarity and at a less frenzied tempo.

In the middle movement, we find a typical Shostakovichian compositional technique: tonal ambiguity. The ghoulish waltz pits G minor and G major tonalities against one another. While the principal melody features a B-natural (typical of a G major scale), the viola plays an accompaniment featuring a B-flat, which is found in a G minor scale. Overall, it creates a feeling of unease because you can never pinpoint the exact key signature.

At 11:25, Shostakovich quotes the march-like theme from his Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107 he composed the previous year.

The penultimate movement is perhaps the most pessimistic of the entire work. It opens with the first violin’s drone carrying over from the previous movement and a rapid, banging three-note motif in the rest of the strings.

It is an easy trap to assign extra-musical meanings to the drone-and-banging theme—some suggest the violin’s drone represents a distant aircraft while the bangs are gun or cannon shots. Considering that Shostakovich composed the work in Dresden, which was heavily bombed by the Allied Forces, the likeness could easily be inferred. Others suggest it is the Secret Police knocking on doors rounding up dissidents who failed to meet the Communist Party’s rules and are being carted off to prison camps.

Further to the above, between the three-note “knocks,” Shostakovich quotes four notes from the medieval Catholic requiem mass’ Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). The composer also quotes two Russian works, namely the revolutionary song Languishing in Prison and a funeral anthem, Tormented by the Weight of Bondage, You Glorify Death with Honor. Talk about pessimistic…

An aria from his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, is played by the cello in the upper range too before the knock motif is heard a final time.

In the final movement, the DSCH theme is introduced again fugally—each instrument takes up the theme after the previous one introduces it. With the final movement, Shostakovich recaptures the themes heard throughout the piece and brings them together as a final, powerful musical statement.

Was Shostakovich a Socialist Realist or Secret Dissenter?

These four varying works explore Dimitri Shostakovich’s output. We started with the work that put his life and career in danger—Lady Macbeth of the Mtesensk District. A work that deeply dissatisfied Joseph Stalin.

In his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich offers an “apology” to the Communist Party, but underneath the veneer of officialdom, he still manages to defy the rules of Socialist Realism while flying under Stalin’s radar. It is also a deeply autobiographical work that has stood the test of time for nearly 80 years as one of the staples in the Western world’s symphonic canon.

To bring balance to the equation, Song of the Forests is an “official” composition by the composer where all the prescriptions of Socialist Realism glorify Stalin’s plans to reforest the Russian Steppes.

In the Eighth String Quartet, composed seven years after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich is introspective, brooding, and self-quoting numerous of his works in one of his most autobiographical works.

In my opinion, Shostakovich was neither a secret dissenter nor a Socialist Realist. He was a champion who forged his own path during dark and troubled times and left a rich legacy behind—despite the hardships he had to endure.

Kahnweiler thoroughly explores the theory behind the representational conflicts between Picasso and Braque during the early years of the Cubist movement. However, Kahnweiler’s history should primarily be seen as his personal perspective, even though it overlaps with the concerns of the two artists. It is as much a story of Kahnweiler’s Cubism as it is of Picasso’s and Braque’s, if not more. This article will explore The Rise of Cubism in this context and point out where Kahnweiler and his artists agree and where they differ.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on Cubism

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) was one of the most influential voices in the sphere of avant-garde art in the early decades of the 20th century. He was the art dealer and personal confidant of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the originators of Cubist painting, and as such, his thoughts on this “new painting” are invaluable. There are many approaches to the study of Cubism, with different methods and concerns. Kahnweiler’s theoretical understanding of the Cubist project, however, must be attended to as a testimony to the problems which Picasso and Braque were wrestling with, given the close cooperation of the three men. Nonetheless, Kahnweiler’s account must not be made synonymous with the authentic and personal aims of Braque and Picasso, as he imports certain concerns of his own into his narrative.

In 1912, four years after Braque’s Houses at l’Estaque and five years after Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Kahnweiler published The Rise of Cubism. This book, among others by the same author, formed the generally accepted canonical story of the development of Cubism. Yet it is a partisan story of Cubism, as Kahnweiler naturally emphasized the work of his two protégés at the expense of the so-called Salon Cubists, who diverged in their aims. Kahnweiler’s book is essential for an understanding of his “studio Cubists.”

This article will look at some of the theoretical underpinnings of Kahnweiler’s understanding of Cubism. He was in a unique position as a first-hand witness to the early development of the movement. But, despite there being an overlap in themes and concerns in his account and the scant accounts of Picasso and Braque, there are differences. Most importantly, Kahnweiler seeks to impose his own reading of 18th-century German idealism on the Cubist project. His epistemology (theory of knowledge) is borrowed from Immanuel Kant’s thought, and there is no evidence that Braque thought in this way, while it is even less likely that Kant was an influence on Picasso’s work.

The Task

Kahnweiler writes that Cubism does not differ in its means from representational art in general. He remarks that the method and the task are the same: the transposition of the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. In this, even traditional painting—but especially Cubist art—is akin to “geometrical drawing.”

Because Cubism bears the geometrical principle as integral to its formalism, Kahnweiler seems to be implying not only the illusoriness of traditional representation but also its deceit. Traditional painting, he says, has characterized its images as self-contained, exhaustive, and complete. But, because it is “merely visual” as an art, and excludes what he maintains as the tactility of Cubism, traditional painting is inherently flawed and partial in two senses. Firstly, it is incomplete, and secondly, it permits only one perspective on the physical world, rooted in its single-viewpoint derived simulacra or untrue “semblances.”

Opening Form

According to Kahnweiler, it was Picasso who first “pierced” the “closed form” of traditional illusionistic representation in painting and paved the way for Cubism. This “closed form” is held to neglect the essential characteristics of the object itself. It does so in its use of “chiaroscuro,” or, as Kahnweiler terms it, “objectivated light.” By this, he seems to mean that traditional illusionism paints light as it falls on the object, without any insight into the object itself. Cubism, on the other hand, liberates form and color from the object as it is in itself. Traditional painting, therefore, misses the point and goal of representation and is “illusory” for the reason that it portrays merely the inessential surfaces of things.

Authenticity, not Distortion

Many accounts of Cubism refer to its distortion of form or of the physical object. This is a false perception according to Kahnweiler. He accords this attribute instead to traditional painting. By virtue of its verisimilitude, or naturalist depiction of the world, he seems to imply that the distortion involved in traditional painting is conceptual and perceptual.

Kahnweiler argues that the real object is in both the Cubist “rhythm of forms” and the spectator’s memory, perhaps in a relation of synthesis. In this, he makes Cubism, for all its seeming austerity of pictorial form and rarefied theory, a social and discursive art. This “new painting” is opposed by implication to traditional painting’s seeming pictorial dictation, its closed expression, and its unchangeable perspective (in both senses).

Far from asserting a Cubist distortion of form or an exclusive concern with form, Kahnweiler writes that Braque and Picasso are representing objects rather than planes, cylinders, etc. He notes Braque’s “undistorted real objects” as a “stimulus which carries with it memory images.” This is a further comment on the participation of the attuned spectator: “These images construct the finished object in the mind.” The completion of the object is, therefore, ideational as well as perceptual, reliant on the observer’s imagination as well as his/her store of memory images.

Kahnweiler says that there can be no distortion in Cubism’s rhythmic coordination and its aesthetic unity. With its analysis of form (the object in its constituent parts) comes “assimilation” and the reconstruction of the object in its visual and tactile entirety. This principle is embodied in Picasso’s and Braque’s depiction of the object in the round and from multiple viewpoints in a simultaneous cohesion.

Objective Unity

The Cubist concern with unity, as Kahnweiler terms it, is also a concern of traditional single-point painting. However, he writes that the traditional style and Cubism diverge in terms of how to achieve it. The opposition he establishes here is between the “closed form” of tradition with its illusory pretensions and Cubist unity: that of the representation of the essential wholeness of the object.

This new unity is achieved in a double manner and in two “spheres.” The double manner is in the analysis of the objective form and the synthesis of the resultant parts in the revelation of the fullness of the object. This double process takes place in both the sphere of the artistic process (perceiving and representing the object) and in the mind of the spectator. The spectator perceives the representation in an act which Kahnweiler calls “objective perception.” It is possible that he means this in a double way too: to refer to the perception of the representation of the object as it is, and to a clear and impartial perception that is free of both artistic dictation and the projection of preconceptions.

Kant’s Metaphysics or the Aesthetic?

Kahnweiler’s use of the terms “analytic” and “synthetic,” which he also applies to two supposed stages of the development of Cubism, provides a clue as to the derivation of his theoretical apparatus. Indeed, he explicitly quotes his inspiration in The Rise of Cubism. The 18th-century German transcendental idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of perception wants to “put together the various conceptions and comprehend their variety in one perception.” This quotation seems a neat summation of the operations of Cubist representation.

The geometric shape, straight lines, and regular curves are “deeply rooted in man” (sic), according to Kahnweiler. He states in Kantian language that geometric shapes “are the necessary condition for all objective perception.” He characterized Cubist abstraction of form as quite opposed to a distortion, as a humanist return to an original and universal archetype “deeply rooted in man.”

Kahnweiler goes on to say that it is not only “objective perception” that is dependent on this in-built capacity: “[o]ur a priori knowledge of these forms is the necessary condition without which there would be no seeing, no world of objects.” This is all part of Kantian idealist philosophy, which maintains that time and space themselves have no external existence and are rooted in the human faculties. But it is here perhaps that Kahnweiler veers away from the sense that Georges Braque made of his Cubism. Braque wrote of a translation of the worldly fact into “the pictorial fact” that would be a sort of analogue or parallel to that world of physical objects. In this, he could be argued to prioritise the physical world as knowable, but pre-existent to and independent of human consciousness.

For Braque, Cubism—or at least his Cubism—is more responsive to artistic means and the world than self-referencing the a priori (original, before experience) longing for geometric form. In this way, he differs from Kahnweiler’s contention that geometric form is the structure upon which we build the “products of our imagination.” These products, he says, are made of the “stimuli on the retina and memory images.” For Braque, the pictorial means in response to the world comes first, and this informs the artistic manipulation of form into the essential appearance.

Braque also opines that “[t]he subject is not the object; it is the new unity, the lyricism which stems entirely from the means employed.” In this, there is a seeming claim for artistic autonomy in terms of finding solutions to the task of true representation. Yet, in terms of the “stimuli of the retina,” Braque does not lose sight of the physical object either in his explications or in his painting. So, Braque slightly disagrees with Kahnweiler. The former attributes the formal appearance of Cubism to the resolution of representational problems, while the latter attributes it to the innate propensity to “underlying basic forms.” These forms for Kahnweiler are a “skeletal frame” beneath the “final visual result of the painting.” 

Kahnweiler’s Cubism: In Conclusion

In all, Kahnweiler’s account of Cubism is both authentic and not completely trustworthy. The Rise of Cubism is a genuine narrative based on personal relationships with the two prime artists of early Cubism. Because of this, he had an intimate knowledge of the aesthetic and representational problems that the two pioneers were wrestling with, and no doubt he related much of the artists’ thoughts. It is also an authentic account of the efforts he himself mounted for the publicization of the work of Picasso and Braque, which were hugely successful in terms of subsequent views on the history of the movement.

It is indisputable that the two men were Cubism’s originators, but Kahnweiler’s history makes little sense when studying the slightly later school of the Salon Cubists. For example, his later division of two periods of the early movement into “analytic” and “synthetic” is entirely based on the course of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism, and he rarely refers to contemporary or subsequent innovations within that school.

The Rise of Cubism and Kahnweiler’s later histories are largely exercises in the promotion of the importance of his two protégés. But his attempt to foist 18th-century German transcendental idealism on early Cubism as its prime mover is, despite its similarities, a concern of his own.

Bibliography

Harrison and Wood (eds), Art in Theory: 1900-2000.

Initially a commercial artist and an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, John Sloan became part of the Ashcan School and one of New York’s greatest painters. He was fascinated by the city’s hustle and bustle, the alluring vignettes of life found on every city street. He painted prostitutes, drunks, street urchins, laborers, and European immigrants, all with an evenhanded and realistic touch. He didn’t sentimentalize urban poverty or suffering but instead chose to faithfully and fairly render life and leisure in the city.

John Sloan Biography

Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in 1871 and moved to Philadelphia when he was only a few years old. He taught himself how to etch when he was a young man and then chose to attend drawing classes at the Spring Garden Institute. His first work was as a freelance commercial artist, joining the art department of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1892 and the Philadelphia Press in 1895. In the meantime, he was also one of the artists who formed the Charcoal Club, seeking to escape the confines, and tuition, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was inspired by Robert Henri, one of the most important art teachers of the day, and began painting portraits and the city of Philadelphia in the 1890s.

In 1904, Sloan and his wife, Dolly, whom he’d married in 1901, moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined like-minded painters in “The Eight” exhibition at Macbeth Gallery, which inaugurated the formation of the Ashcan School. He was also drawing for The Masses, a radical publication, and organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910. The Whitney Museum notes that in New York, “he harnessed the skills he had learned from newspaper work—the ability to memorize characteristic details and sketch quickly on the street—to paint impressionistic images of squalid tenements, streets and storefronts, parks, restaurants, and bustling crowds.”

Sloan participated in the famous Armory Show of 1913 (contributing two oils and five etchings), taught at the Arts Student League, and was president of the Society of Independent Artists. His style was emphatically realistic; he once said, “I am a realist…I am more interested in the noble commonplace of nature than in the curious: believing that form and color are tools of the artist’s imagination in re-creating life.” Later in life, he began spending summers in New Mexico and admired Native American art and Mexican muralists. He died of cancer in 1951.

Ashcan Art

The Ashcan School of Art was so named because of its focus on the grittiness of urban life at the expense of moralizing content and aesthetic appeal. The term’s originator was Art Young, who contributed to the socialist publication The Masses along with many of the painters who would make up “The Eight” (Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks, Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Everett Shinn; later Glenn Coleman and George Bellows would be considered core parts of the School).

The “ashcan” moniker was not meant to be flattering. Young complained of Henri’s followers in general that they “want to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street…For my part, I do not want to be connected with a publication that does not try to point out the way out of a sordid materialistic world.” Young disliked the depiction of the homeless, prostitutes, orphans, and working men on their own terms, without heavy-handed sympathy. It seemed like the Ashcan artists were alright painting the world as it was, without trying to change it.

But it wasn’t just the down-and-out that the Ashcan artists took for their subjects; rather, they were painting life in New York City at the turn of the century with all its complexity, change, and opportunity. There were scenes in restaurants and bars; of immigrant women and street peddlers; of dancers, revelers, boxers, and circus performers; of people sitting on roofs and stoops; of children playing and swimming, women gossiping and working, and men smoking and drinking. The city itself was a character, as the skyscrapers, subways, elevated railways, riverfront parks and piers, rooftops, and crowded avenues formed the backdrop for its denizens.

Sloan’s own interpretation of New York City is brought to life in these six works of art.

1. Election Night, 1907

The scene depicted here, which Sloan witnessed, is a public celebration in Herald Square where people gathered to find out the results of local, state, and federal elections, which were projected on the side of the New York Herald building at Sixth and Broadway. The mood is raucous and exhilarating. People are throwing confetti, blowing tin horns, and tickling each other with “ticklers,” one of which the woman in red at the center of the canvas is holding. Everyone is in motion, jostling against each other and laughing. Under the gleam of the streetlamps, windows of the El, and lights from the buildings, the scene is more like a New Year’s Eve celebration than a political gathering.

Art historians Robert W. Snyder and Rebecca Zurier find this painting notable for its depiction of new uses of public spaces in the city. The subjects of the painting “breach all rules of correct decorum on city streets” and, referencing an article in Harper’s Weekly from 1908 that sniffed at the unseemliness of the behavior on Broadway on election night, said, “[the painting] reveals another truth that most urban images concealed: in a city, especially during special moments of celebration, one can expect to be jostled and not mind it.”

2. Hairdresser’s Window, 1907

Sloan painted this scene more or less as he actually saw it, explaining in his diary that he had been walking to Henri’s studio and saw a woman in a window with bleached blonde hair, also bleaching the hair of her client as others on the street below watched. This scene exemplifies Sloan’s comment that, “In between illustration jobs I roamed the streets, finding human incidents to etch and paint.”

The scene features the hairdresser and client as Sloan wrote of them in the diary, totally oblivious to the curiosity they are engendering below, which is represented by a woman’s rather aghast expression and the fixed stares of several men. The window is surrounded by signs and advertisements, but the hairdresser actually doing her work is the most effective advertisement of them all. Susan Fillin-Yeh has argued persuasively that Sloan’s positionality in this painting makes little rational sense, as he is sort of hovering above the crowd; she notes that perspective, in general, is never really fixed or stable and that Sloan’s “slapdash and robust yet carefully observed constructions only appear to be uninflected scenes of daily life.” Sloan is actually illuminating as much about the nature of painting as the nature of life in a modern metropolis.

3. Chinese Restaurant, 1909

Sloan believed that “you must…paint the things that you know.” For him, that was his city and its quotidian spaces, like restaurants. Chinese Restaurant derived from a memory he had of a restaurant in which a female patron had a red feather atop her hat; he wrote in his diary, “I saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant’s fat cat. It would be a good thing to paint. I may make a go at it.” He revisited the restaurant to refresh his memory, and it was “just in time, for tomorrow, they move to the corner below (29th St.).”

The scene features two sets of dining companions: the aforementioned woman with the red feather and a man in the foreground, and two men slightly behind them. The woman laughingly reaches forward to give the eager cat a bit of her food while her companion slurps his noodles from a porcelain bowl. A Chinese restaurant was not a typical subject of fine art, especially as the interior of this place is both dingy and rather lurid, but Sloan’s embrace of “what he knew” made for a compelling image of how real New Yorkers lived (and ate).

4. Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912

New York City skyscrapers rose to new vertical heights in the early 20th century, and along with them, the horizontal space of the rooftops became more important for urban dwellers. In 1929, the New York Times wrote of discovering “a city above the city” and how people no longer ignored their rooftops, that “[the] varied uses of roofs in a crowded city pile up to an amazing total.” On rooftops, apartment dwellers could string up their laundry, sleep under the stars to escape the stifling interior heat, sneak away for an amorous interlude, or, in Sloan’s 1912 painting, gather with friends and dry their hair.

The three women in this painting are conversing amiably and drying their hair in the fresh air. Laundry hangs nearby, suggesting, along with the simple coarseness of their dress, that they will need to return to their work soon. Sloan called the women in this painting “humble roof-top players” and brought back scenes of three women on rooftops engaged in conversation in 1913’s Roof Gossips and 1944/50’s Roof Chats. He also painted other rooftop scenes, which included subjects like raising pigeons, sunbathing, admiring the sunset, and stealing someone else’s laundry.

5. McSorley’s Bar, 1912

McSorley’s Old Ale House, established in 1854, is New York’s oldest continually operated saloon. Initially only open to men (it would remain this way until 1970!), it was a watering hole par excellence. John McSorley, an immigrant from Ireland who arrived in New York in 1851, opened his bar at 15 East 7th Street and referred to it as “The Old House at Home.” His son, William J. McSorley, took over its management in 1911 after his father’s death. For a brief period of time, the bar sold hard alcohol but ultimately decided to stick with just ale. During Prohibition, it sold “near beer” and remained open.

John Sloan painted the bar five times: “I have never gone slumming to get subject matter. I was in McSorley’s ale house about ten times in my life and painted five pictures of the place.” This version, exhibited at the Armory Show but remaining unsold, shows five patrons engaged in conversation and imbibing pints of beer. The mood is relaxed and convivial, the setting homey and familiar with its eclectic array of tchotchkes and small paintings.

6. Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928

As Sloan painted into the decade that would be known as “The Roaring Twenties,” his art seemed less ashcan and more jazz club. In this piece, Sloan pays equal attention to the built landscape—the Elevated, Jefferson Market Courthouse in the background, storefront, and streetlamps—as he does to the people enjoying it.

In this painting, it is mostly women out for a night on the town, which is an indication of just how much was changing for “The New Woman” of the early 20th century. These women weren’t rich, but they were dressed well, wearing the new flapper style of shorter dresses, bobbed hair, small hats, high heels, and stockings. Some of them may be enjoying a flirtation with two young men in a car; one woman seems unable to tear herself away. A group of six others is all arm-in-arm, laughing and crossing the street, probably on their way to their next speakeasy or dance. It is a classic scene of New York nightlife, able to be replicated in nearly any era with just a few tweaks to clothing and architecture.

Bibliography

Fillen-Yeh, S. (2007). Images as Imaginary Documents: John Sloan’s Sidewalks and Thresholds. In Heather Campbell Coyle & Joyce F. Schiller (Eds.), John Sloan’s New York. Delaware Art Museum.

Sloan, H. Farr. (1978). John Sloan New York Etchings (1905-1949). Dover Publications, Inc.

Snyder, R. W. and Zurier, R. (1995). Picturing the City. In Snyder et al., Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Thomas, Adam M. (2019). From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space. Pennsylvania State University Press.

Tottis, J. (2007). Bars, Cafes, and Parks: The Ashcan’s Joie de Vivre. In Tottis et al., Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925. Merrell Publishers Limited.

Paris, 1836. Dilettantish ladies and gentlemen of the upper classes mix with the poets and artists who, now more than ever, constitute the city’s true nobility: a meritocracy, founded on a veneration for art’s spiritual importance. The lights are low; the conversation turns on revolution, freedom, democracy: this is the height of Romanticism. It is the optimal setting for a meeting which will forever marry the music and literature of this era, an auspicious meeting (or was it?) between the composer Frédéric Chopin and the author George Sand.

Who Were Chopin and Sand?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this meeting in a Paris salon in 1836 comprised two men. George Sand, aged 32 and already the author of a dozen novels, had taken her pen name from a former lover and co-author, Jules Sandeau. She also abbreviated her first name, removing the final ‘s’ that ordinarily ends the name Georges in French, constructing a pseudonym which successfully confounded her audience and her peers.

Over the course of a prolific writing career, Sand (born Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin) came to be regarded as an equal by contemporaries such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert. The latter addressed her as “Chère Maître,” blending the feminine word for ‘dear’ with the masculine word for ‘master.’ Hugo once commented:

“George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother.”

This was in part because Sand had obtained police permission (as was necessary in early 19th-century Paris) to wear men’s clothing. Ostensibly, such permits were for occupational purposes, or for horse-riding, but Sand used her dress (and habit of cigar smoking) to move uninhibited among men’s circles.

Then there was her writing, begun after a scandalous separation from her duke husband and a string of public affairs, including poets, politicians, and possibly an actress. With their frankness about relationships between men and women, Sand’s novels shocked and delighted people as much as her behavior did, and encouraged public uncertainty around her gender presentation.

This explains Chopin‘s notorious slight on meeting Sand that night in 1836: “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” Not the most auspicious start, but it is unlikely Chopin had ever met anyone quite like Sand.

The pianist, aged 26, had moved to Paris five years earlier, fleeing political unrest in his native Poland. As an émigré who retained a strong connection to his homeland, he was reluctant to shake up society in the way that Sand, a passionate socialist, was doing.

By most accounts (and he left very little about himself in his own words), Chopin was intensely private, shunning the showy world of virtuoso performances (then a very popular spectacle thanks to his friend Franz Liszt) and carefully selecting students for his piano teaching from the best Parisian families.

It was thanks to Liszt that Chopin and Sand met, although it would take a little while for Chopin to be grateful for this. Liszt was engaged in a Romantic liaison of his own, with another author who had left her high-born husband: Countess Marie d’Agoult. When d’Agoult invited various artistic friends to her salon one evening in 1836, Liszt invited Chopin, but they didn’t hit it off. That would take another couple of years.

Turmoil: Winter in Majorca

According to one possibly apocryphal story, Sand tried to wear down the reluctant Chopin at one soirée following their initial meeting by robing herself in a silk dress of red and white, the colors of the Polish flag. It was a demonstration of her fierce support for revolutionary uprising, for ordinary people claiming their freedoms, as many interpreted the outbreaks of civil unrest in both Poland and France at this time.

The sentiment may or may not have appealed to Chopin; the extent of his support for a free Poland remains the subject of critical debate. When their relationship ended, Sand got rid of nearly all their letters, so it is difficult to get close to the real Chopin or imagine how the two conversed.

Writing in 1838 to another Polish émigré and close friend of Chopin, Count Wojciech Grzymała, Sand wrote that she had, with surprise, realized the strength of her feelings for Chopin. She was prepared to throw over any other potential suitors if he would just ask. Soon he did, and in the winter of 1838, they set off together to escape the wagging tongues of Paris, making for the Spanish island of Majorca.

It was intended to benefit them both. Chopin sought the warmer southern climate to soothe his periodic bouts of ill health (later to develop into tuberculosis). Sand hoped to discover in the Majorcans a group of people primed to rise up and claim their independence.

Our source for the trip is Sand, who wrote up the experience as a travelogue published in 1841 (A Winter in Majorca). The island was not quite what she hoped. It was November, cold and wet. The locals were hostile to the unmarried, bohemian couple, who had pitched up with Sand’s two children. Struggling to find adequate food or lodgings, the four ended up staying in a damp disused monastery in the village of Valldemossa.

Curiously, Chopin is only a shadowy figure in Winter in Majorca, referred to not by name but as “the sick man.” Sand is tight-lipped on a topic which has since garnered a lot of interest from Chopin scholars: his composition, during their stay, of his Preludes, Op. 28.

This collection of 24 preludes was modeled on J.S. Bach‘s Well-Tempered Clavier, which contained preludes and fugues written in every key (12 major and 12 minor). Chopin omitted the fugues and concentrated on the prelude as a complete work in its own right, revealing an interest in fragmentation and smaller forms which was characteristic of Romantic piano music. We know that Chopin took a copy of Bach‘s collection to Majorca, though it is difficult to tell which of his own pieces he finished there, and which had already been completed back in Paris.

Although Chopin underwent quite a saga in getting his preferred make of piano (a Pleyel) shipped to Majorca so that he could compose, he must eventually have found the environment stimulating enough to compose these celebrated pieces, including the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude. This title came not from Chopin (who never gave titles to his works beyond simple descriptions of their form, such as Ballade or Waltz), but from Sand.

Later, in her autobiography, she wrote about inventing the title on a rainy day during their sojourn in Majorca:

“When I called [Chopin’s] attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 7)

Were any of Chopin’s Preludes really inspired by, or even written in, Majorca? Was he as constantly ill as Sand suggests? Can music, like poetry, imitate nature? This most Romantic of getaways leaves open these questions and many more.

Tranquility: Summers at Nohant

Most biographers, even the least sympathetic to Sand, credit the relationship with helping Chopin to write his best compositions. James Huneker, who generally demonized Sand for her numerous affairs and accused her of draining artistic geniuses of their talent like a vampire, admitted:

“Chopin had some one to look after him—he needed it—and in the society of this brilliant Frenchwoman he throve amazingly: his best work may be traced to Nohant and Majorca.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 2)

Nohant was Sand’s country house, inherited from her grandmother, where she and Chopin spent every summer from 1839 to 1846. Guests joining them included Liszt, Balzac, Flaubert, the renowned soprano Pauline Viardot, and the painter Eugène Delacroix, who (like many Romantics) was deeply inspired by music, and who began an unfinished double portrait in 1838 showing Chopin at the piano and Sand at his side, rapt in listening to his music.

We know that Nohant gave Chopin a tranquil base, away from the hustle and bustle of Paris, to compose pieces such as his ‘Heroic’ Polonaise. But what did Sand gain? Did Chopin supply her with ideas, as she furnished Romantic fantasies surrounding his compositions?

In 1838, Sand wrote a closet drama (a play written for private reading, not the stage), which suggests that conversations with Chopin (and perhaps Liszt, a voracious autodidact and writer himself) influenced her thought. The Seven Strings of the Lyre is Sand’s reworking of the Faust legend, in which the scientist Faust is tempted by Mephistopheles, a servant of the Devil, to forsake his soul in the pursuit of knowledge.

Sand’s version is even more Romantic than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s famous play. Faust is replaced with Albertus, who suffers the characteristic ennui of the Romantic hero. As Mephistopheles tries to win his soul, Albertus is helped by the angelic Helen and her lyre, whose seven strings represent different virtues of human nature. The lyre becomes instrumental, literally, in transmitting harmonious music representative of human goodness.

Recent readers of the play, although interested in Sand’s ideas about the spiritual power of music, have been disappointed that this version of Faust by such a radical proto-feminist as Sand seems to preserve Goethe’s one-dimensional, heavily idealized portrayal of womanhood. But given that the play was written during, and inspired by, her relationship with a musician, it’s tempting to read Chopin as an inspiration for the lyre-wielding Helen.

Romanticism’s Odd Couple

Chopin and Sand have always been swathed in gender ambiguity. Sand was the cross-dressing cigar smoker who defied expectations to claim her place in a literary pantheon dominated by men. Chopin, many contemporary sources note, was as picky about his clothing as any high-society woman. He wrote almost solely for the piano, which in early 19th-century Paris was played by women in their droves. His pieces were heard as light, airy, delicate, not quite feminine but androgynous, like an angel or a sprite.

Recent speculation has centered on Chopin’s letters to his schoolfriend Tytus Woyciechowski, which address him in passionate language and refer to kissing. While it’s important to remember that understandings of sexuality are constructed differently across places and times, and these expressions of love may not have correlated to a modern, Western view of homosexual identity, this speculation about Chopin’s identity does offer a different slant on his relationship with Sand. Think back to his early comment casting aspersions on her femininity: perhaps he was drawn to her cross-dressing, not repelled by it.

Another way of seeing the relationship, fueled by Sand’s comments as the years went on, is in terms of a mother and child. Although she was only six years older, she came to view Chopin as her third child, especially during his periods of illness when she took on a caregiving role.

Although the two lived together in Paris and Nohant, they gradually ceased to have a physical relationship, if they had ever had one. This question is also swathed in ambiguity, not least because many subsequent commentators (conscious of Sand’s reputation and eager to rescue Chopin from scandal as he grew, posthumously, into a revered icon of the classical canon) represented the relationship as “a pure and cordial friendship” (Hadow 2012, p. 128). Was her “little angel,” “beloved little corpse,” a lover in the same sense as the ones before him?

What Drove Chopin and Sand Apart?

You might think that airing dirty laundry in a novel is a good reason for a break-up. When Sand published Lucrezia Floriani in 1846, mutual friends of the author and of Chopin were taken aback by the close similarity between the real-life couple and the fictional Lucrezia and Prince Karol. Lucrezia is older, a retired actress, with children from a previous relationship; Prince Karol is sickly, reclusive, and jealous of Lucrezia’s interactions with other men.

Is this a portrait of Sand and Chopin’s relationship? She later insisted that, although her writing achieved its trademark realism by drawing on her life, she had the artist’s skill of transforming her material into art through her imagination. If this seems a flimsy excuse, what about the fact that Chopin, apparently, listened to Sand recite passages of the novel and did not object once?

Romanticism is known for blending life and art. These artists prided themselves on creating works that could truly claim to give insight into the human soul. Whose souls did they know best? Their own, and those around them. The roman à clef, or novel with a key, in which characters correspond to real people in the author’s life, was rife in this period.

While the Romantics had the same debates as we do about the ethics of displaying our private lives, they prized verisimilitude, or faithfulness, in art. If Chopin did recognize himself in Lucrezia Floriani, perhaps he chose to ignore this and pay more attention to the truth of the feelings Sand was representing.

A more prosaic cause of the breakdown between Chopin and Sand was the composer’s relationships with the author’s children as they grew into adults. Maurice, the son, was resentful of Chopin, while Solange, the daughter, doted on him (there has been speculation about their relationship). In 1847, Chopin took Solange’s side in a dispute between Sand and her daughter and son-in-law, sculptor Auguste Clésinger. Sand and Chopin separated, seeing each other only once more: a chance meeting, when neither spoke.

When Chopin died of tuberculosis in 1849, Solange was among the mourners at his deathbed. Clésinger sculpted the monument of a weeping woman (Euterpe, the classical muse of music) on Chopin’s tomb in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery. Sand kept away.

To her detractors, Sand’s absence is further proof that she was to blame for Chopin’s death. Many 19th-century accounts, in the absence of widespread knowledge about tuberculosis, represent the composer as dying of heartbreak. But from a modern perspective, we might speculate that Sand stayed away because it was too painful, or out of a desire not to cause more harm.

Sand and Chopin remain one of Romanticism’s quintessential pairings, precisely because of the unlikeliness and tempestuousness of the affair. They leave more questions unanswered than answered, suspending us in an essentially Romantic striving after impossible knowledge.

They united music and literature in a melting pot of fascinating mutual influence. Like all the great Romantics, they testify to the important results that come from the overlapping of art, genius, and love.

Sources

Hadow, W. H. (2012). Studies in modern music, second series: Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms. Project Gutenberg edition.

Huneker, James (2004). Chopin: the Man and his Music. Project Gutenberg edition.