Larry Sitsky - 7 Meditations On Symbolist Art (1974) - 03 Satan's Treasures (Jean Delville)

Abstract

"Larry Sitsky's Seven Meditations on Symbolist Art for organ is a work of great excitement, power and drama. Each of its movements is based on a painting from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. When performed in the acoustic ambience of a resonant cathedral on a large romantic instrument, with slides of the paintings projected on to a big screen, its strong visual and musical images evoke profound and sometimes disturbing feelings in the listener. SevenM editations on Symbolist Art was written for the composer's friend and colleague Donald Hollier in 1974, and it was first performed at Festival Australia '75. It is tempting to view this piece as a contemporary Pictures at an Exhibition. Certainly the compositional technique belongs to this century. The chromatic chord clusters played by the arm, extending over two and even three octaves, and found in The Cry, The Abandoned City and The Black Idol, are the most obvious manifestations of a modern harmonic imagination. However, even when the composer swings to the other end of the harmonic spectrum and uses tonal harmony (as in The Kiss of the Sphinx and Beata Beatrix), a neoteric frame of mind is evident. The harmonies float with a sense of direction towards a tonic, but they are rarely allowed to resolve. There are two melodic 'sources' or nuclear themes which appear in some form in most of the movements. They may be inverted, transposed, or used in the retrograde form, like the tone rows of serial technique. Unlike those rows, however, they do not contain the twelve pitche of the chromatic scale, they sometimes repeat pitches, they are not used harmonically, arid they are not (with one exception) used in a consistent manner. That exception is The Black Idol where the fifteen appearances of the first nuclear theme account for almost all of the melodic material in the piece. There are strong resemblances and parallels between this work and some of the organ music of Messiaen. Sitsky supertitles his composition 'an organ book', surely a reference to Messiaen's Liv red' orgue ofl 951. Both works contain seven pieces and use extra-musical ideas as titles or sub-titles. Messiaen' s extra-musical ideas come from biblical verses, while Sitsky's are the titles of works of art. There is a striking resemblance between the second section of Sitsky 's Satan's Treasures and Messiaen's Les yeux dans les roues. Both are trios with very quick manual parts in rhythmic unison moving against a slow pedal part. Parts of Sitsky' s Beata Beatrix suggest sections of Messiaen's Le Banquet celeste. And the final section of Sitsky's The Kiss of the Sphinx is much like the final section of Transports de joie from Messiaen's suite L'Ascension. These resemblances and parallels are textural only; Sitsky's writing does not reflect Messiaen' s rhythmic and harmonic theories. The term 'symbolism' in art history refers to a movement in the late 1880s and 1890s which turned away from the traditional definitions of art as an imitation of reality. It substituted a definition in which art was seen as a vehicle for the direct transliteration of mood and feeling, through form, line, and colour. Thus art became less naturalistic and more abstract. We noted earlier the temptation to compare Seven Meditations with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. But this comparison does not do justice to the deep and complex relationship between the paintings and Sitsky's music. Mussorgsky's opus, for all of its greatness, is based on a very simple idea. Victor Hartmann's paintings, which imitate reality in a naturalistic manner, are depicted simply and directly in Mussorgsky's music. Furthermore, the visual element is necessary to understand the music in only the most general way. It does not matter that most of us have not seen the original paintings. On the other hand, Sit ky begins with visual art which is more complex, more inward, and more spiritual than that of Hartmann. His music does not simply describe the paintings. The fusion of two art forms - music and painting - produces a new rut in the san1e way that several art forms combine to produce opera. The interaction of the music and paintings allows exploration of a deep psychological and spiritual inner world. Furthermore, there is a dramatic progression from one piece to the next, from crisis in the first movement to resolution in the last. The Cry (1895) by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was inspired by a vivid and traumatic experience, in which the painter saw 'clouds of blood and tongues of fire' floating above the 'blue-black fjord and the town'. The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895) is one of the many paintings on mythological subjects by Franz van Stuck (1863-1928). The sphinx in Greek mythology was a monstrous creature which propounded enigmas, strangling and devouring those who could not solve them. In Satan's Treasures (1895), painted by the Belgian artist Jean Delville (1867-1951), 'the fallen archangel bounds with the elastic jump of a dancer astride the prostrate bodies. In this dance of enchantment we see Satan himself, his red hair in an aureola, held prisoner by huge spiral tentacles which have replaced his wings'. The Abandoned City ( 1904) by Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) is, in effect, a symbolic portrait of its painter. It 'condenses in an almost surrealistic image Khnopff' s personal feelings of isolation as well as encapsulating ... various aspects of social criticism ... A row of fifteenth century Flemish houses with blind windows awaits the erosion of an indifferent sea'. The coloured aquatint Black Idol, also entitled Defiance, was produced in 1900 by Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) as an illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's poem Dreamland. 'Here Kupka symbolizes man's metaphysical fear with three figures: a gigantic, dark, horrifying deity ...; a petrified, probably human form; a diminutive helpless man.' The lithograph A Mask Tolls the Knell (1882) by Odilon Redon ( 1840-1916) was also inspired indirect! y by the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. Beata Beatrix ( 1863) is the work of the English Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). In the words of Esther Wood, it pictures 'not the actual death of Dante's beloved, but rather a mystic trance in which is made known to her the nearness of her end. She sits on a balcony overlooking the city of Florence, which is already shadowed by the coming loss. Before her is a sundial, marking the fateful hour. A dove, flying into her lap, carries a poppy-blossom, the symbol of sleep. The lovely face of Beatrice is upturned, as if to greet the unseen messenger, and full of perfect peace. She seems to have attained the sight ofblessedness, and to be yielding her spirit to a deep and sweet content, but the earthly weariness lingers about her brows and on her pale and parted lips'. Seven Meditations mixes images of religion, sexuality, mythology and artistic in1agination. Its theme is progression, growth and ultimate union or fulfilment in several human dimensions - religious or mystic, artistic; psychological and sexual. The-massive angst of the· first movement is resolved in the last. The intervening movements explore that emotional crisis, working through themes of ambivalence, unfulfilled potential, emptiness and loneliness, defiance and anger, and the desire for escape. The organ has a long tradition of association with religious observance. Seven Meditations both denies and affinns that tradition. It is not the servant of liturgical considerations; it does not enhance or ornament congregational song; it neither postulates traditional theological formulae nor even assumes a Deity. Yet in its depiction of the human condition and exploration of the human spirit it is, in the widest sense, a religious work." -- Ralph Morton