Kandinsky and Mussorgsky: When art meets music

Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky wrote his piano work "Pictures at an Exhibition" after having seen an exhibition of his friend, the painter Victor Hartmann, whom he respected very much. Mussorgsky's main goal was not to create a precise musical presentation of the paintings, but to portray the impressions left behind by his deceased friend. Kandinsky was a big fan of the music.

In 2016, the art world celebrated the 150th birthday of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky - an appropriate occasion for bringing the original designs of his stage production "Pictures at an Exhibition" to Dessau, where the work premiered in 1928. The paintings were based on the piano cycle with the same title by composer Modest Mussorgsky.

The model for "Gnomus" is said to have been a watercolor by Hartmann depicting "a gnome clumsily stumbling around on his short legs." Kandinsky's stage setting is only slightly reminiscent of that. Art historian Ludwig Grote describes horizontal stripes that flash up before vertical stripes and a little black figurine appear.

In musical terms, "Catacombae" is a dialogue between Mussorgsky and his dead friend Hartmann. For art historian Ludwig Grote, Kandinsky's transformation on stage was a rather sobering experience: "Whitish-greenish underground. The forms build up according to their size, moving from left to right, until finally the great arch drops down from above."

The daily "Anhalter Anzeiger" wrote about the premiere, "A mysterious construction is standing in front of us, a pointer is turning around, colors are flashing up: green and yellow - the lights at the sides are flashing up again: an incredible tension is enticing, and at the same time, torturing the viewer - it's that old secret that, in our imagination, is surrounding witches and magicians."

Kandinsky's stage direction for this painting was, "All of the figurines are to appear immaterial levitating in a non-defined space." The circles are reminiscent of the wheels of a hay wagon. When Mussorgsky composed this piece, he was imagining a hay wagon drawn by an ox.

Kandinsky's wife Nina said about the work of her husband, "He was unusually gifted in that he was able to imagine the world of his paintings with all of its forms and colors exactly in the same way in which they then appeared on the canvas. His ideas struck him very suddenly in a moment of enlightenment after which he tried to capture them in little thumb-sketches."

The incentive for Kandinsky's stage composition was given by Georg Hartmann, the director of the Friedrich-Theater in Dessau. When visiting Kandinsky's Studio, he was struck by some compositions "which, with their lines and powerful colors, their dramatic contrasts, appeared to have been made for the stage."