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Review by Donata Brugioni, in Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, XXXII, 1997, pp.178-81
Luigi
Verdi’s study on Kandinskij and Skrjabin is the latest of
the texts on the Russian
composer published by the author in
the last few years: D’Annunzio e Skrjabin (Gardone, 1988) and
Aleskandr Skrjabin tra musica e filosofia (Torino, 1990). This new essay
surveys the Russian cultural life of the early 20th century, considering it as a
fundamental moment for several artistic experiences of the following years and
identifies the two artists as pivots around whom all theorizations on
synaestesia and fusion of all arts revolve: this was what some European cultural
environments were interested in during the early decades of 20th century,
leading to the formulation of the Whole work of art. The text, opened by an
introduction outlining the panorama of Russian cultural life between 19th and
20th centuries, includes three parts, each divided in seven chapters, and is
complete with the Final where the author outlines a brief description of
Skrjabin’s influence on post-rrevolutionary Russian artistic environments and
on Bauhaus’s (the school of arts opened in Weimar, where Kandinskij was among
the teachers and where research on the relations between sounds and colours was
a starting point for the development of new artistic forms) activity. A brief
hint to some 20th century composers who got involved in this research ends the
essay, which is complete with a rich bibliography divided by chapters, and with
a useful name index. The first part of the work, Alle origini (The origins),
identifies the starting point of Skrjabin’s and Kandinskij’s research as the
so-called “silver age” of Russian arts: in this period, going approximately
from 1895 to 1925, literary and philosophical research in Russia
developed together with the artistic and musical ones, establishing a wide
network of connections, exchanges and interactions leading to a renewal of the
languages and of the expressing tools in the various arts. What is common in
Kandinskij and Skrjabin is the aspiration towards a form of art which embraces
and includes all as, in Skrjabin’s words, “writing only music wouldn’t be
very interesting! Music takes shape and meaning only when it is connected to a
unique universal plane” (p.4); on
his part, Kandinskij attributes this potential capacity of music to widen his
artistic experience going beyond its limits to the fact that music represents
“the art which does not devote itself to reproduce natural phenomena, but to
express the artist’s soul and to create an independent life through musical
sounds” (p.4). In order to favour the understanding of Skrjabin’s poetic and
musical language, the author refers to the relations between the composer and
the Russian symbolist poets, taking as an example the text of the poem which
Skrjabin had used as an accompaniment to his Fourth Sonata, and which appears to
be strongly inspired by the composer’s attitude, mystical and sensual at the
same time. In the same ways as Kandinskij, Skrjabin feels that the artist
represents the aggregation centre of the spiritual forces which are still hidden
in the humanity, the ones which symbolist poet Belyi defines as “the unknown
and unlimited element which surrounds the human nature”; in this way, the
realization of the work of art takes on a Messianic value towards humanity,
announcing a new spiritual era. This concept, which was circulating in many
intellectual environments at the beginning of
the 20th century, was supported at its highest level by Skrjabin and
Kandinskij: on the basis of quotations and comparisons among writings of that
time, Luigi Verdi’s study connects this fact to the remarkable influence
exerted by theosophic and anthroposophic doctrines on both artists, who saw in
them an answer to their questions or, as Kandinskij wrote, “ a hand pointing
to a directions and gives a help”. The leading element of these theorizations
is represented by a mystic conception of the work of art, which reveals itself
to the artist in its own unavoidable necessity and perfection, to which the
artist himself has simply to listen, so that the creation gets “disclosing”
what already exists in itself. The
primary task of the artist, therefore, is becoming a mediator of this revelation,
by trying to maintain its original value intact, without alterating it. In the
second part of the volume, under the title of “Sounds and Colours”, a wide
space is reserved to the analysis of the relation between sounds and colours, to
which both Kandinskij and Skrjabin devoted a great deal of attention: in
formulating the idea of synthetic art, born out of the fusion of all artistic
forms, infact, Kandinskij considered the experience of Skrjabin’s Prometheus
and the table of sound-colour correspondences used by the composer for this work
as fundamental. Luigi Verdi makes a careful investigation on this problem, by
starting with a brief excursus on the scholars who, in previous ages,
particularly in the 18th century, had tried to codify such correspondences; then,
on the basis of an analysis of the composing technical aspects of Prometheus, he
defines a space unit through which he translates the passing of time within the
score into a graphic representation of the link between sounds and colours as
conceived by Skrjabin. In particular, there is the analysis of the part
(“Light”, noted in the Prometheus score and consisting of two voices: while
the superior voice follows the succession of the various synthetic chords
according to a correspondence table between the spectrum colours and the
fundamental chord sounds, the author interprets the inferior voice as a symbol
of the vision of the world imbued with esoteric meanings which are referable to
theosophic and anthroposophic doctrines and connectable, for this common
relation, to “The language of colours” included in “The spiritual in art
by Kandinskij. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to the performing
problems given by Prometheus which, after a series of attempts, to realize also
the light movements, which were carried out without much success in the course
of the 1910s, was performed for the first time in its integral form only in
1961. Even Kandinskij’s scene composition “Der gelbe Klang” (The yellow
sound), dating back to 1912, had a similar destiny to Prometheus, as it was not
performed but in 1973. In “Synthesis among the arts”, which is the third and
final part of the volume, the author deals with the problem of the Whole work of
art: Kandinskij’s conception of “synthetic art”
approaches Skrjabin’s vision , considering Prometheus one first attempt
towards art fusion, a sort of preliminary essay in view of a more complete
artistic synthesis to be reach with the Mystery, where a unique work would
include in itself all forms of artistic expression, in particular dance and
theatre drama. Dance was to Kandinskij the most suitable form for the
development of synthetic art, a position which was close to the one of several
lovers of esoteric sciences in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century,
giving great importance to dance, not in sense of traditional ballet, but rather
in its sacred value, and therefore referring explicitly to Far Eastern or
ancient Greece dances. In a similar way, Skrjabin was convinced that in the
Greek tragedy still continued to exist the memory of an ancient Whole art, to
which it would be necessary to link for the formulation of the art of the
future. Once more, the author identifies Kandinskij, who in his writings used to
quote Skrjabin, with the spokesman of this common perceiving: “Soon even in
dancing it will be possible to perceive the inner value of every movement and
interior beauty will replace the exterior one” (p.101). The closest example to
the concept of “Whole art” is to Kandinskij the Orthodox liturgy, and the
idea of liturgy is also included in Skrjabin’s Mystery which, according to the
composer, would go beyond the artificial nature of the theatre and lead to
authentic experiences. Therefore, the Mystery would need a place for its
accomplishment, the place which Kandinskij names as “the building devoted to
the ‘great utopia’”, and which Skrjabin describes as “flowing and
changing, flowing as music” , by imagining it as formed by incense columns
continuously gathering and scattering; if, on one hand, this sort of
“architectural dance” as named by Skrjabin, in continuous evolution and
formed mostly by illusory constructions, appears to be a sort of unrealizable
dream, on the other hand it suggests an unconscious virtual setting
prefiguration, a non-place transcending all possibilities of concrete
realization. Surely this is a long way from the multimedia score arranged by
Skrjabin for the Mystery, but the recent attention to the scene compositions of
the so called “silver age”, both in the theatre and in the cinema, confirms
the presence of ideas and issues
which are still stimulating today. In these reading terms, Luigi Verdi’s essay
is extremely interesting, as it is a sort of journey in search for the origins
of multimedialty, not only in its formal or content-focused aspects, but also in
the ethic-philosophical concern which may also be its ideological substrate. Donata
Brugioni |
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