TALKING PICTURES, SOUNDING SENSE

When narrative in literature and poetry has the capacity to inspire the eye and ear with equal force, composers and painters alike are found rushing to re-deliver that impact in the language of paint and music. This is how it looks, they say, or, this is how it sounds; and what they say suggests that music and art created from the same poem or story can often reward our attention to both of them at once. Talking Pictures, Sounding Sense will offer some striking examples of this from both art and music. Here are five especially memorable moments when painters and composers (sometimes more than one of each) have met like moths round thecandle-flame of the same narrative.

MOTHER TO THE RESCUE

Compiled in 1835, to rival Homer, from a millennial oral tradition of songs and stories in Karelia, the Kalevala was irresistible to the young Sibelius and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. They recognized a Finnish folk variation on
the Pietà theme in the episode when a wild hero’s mother tracks him to the underworld and literally puts him together again.

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