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 the candle-flame of the same narrative.
 

UNVEILING THE GRAIL

Like Gawain, the Parsifal story had to wait for its opera moment, Wagner finally taking the bait from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem about that knight’s quest for the Grail. By then, Rossetti, Redon, Burne-Jones and a Bavarian castle’s wall-painters had all pictured Parsifal in the Pyrenean wild, with magic, miracle and healing up ahead.