One of my favourite pieces of orchestral music is Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In my early teens, back in the days of vinyl long-playing records, which rotated on the turntable 33 times per minute, I was given a recording which I played regularly. The music is accessible and exciting, an ideal introduction to the classical tradition. The work had been written for piano in the 1870s, but fifty years later Maurice Ravel had produced an orchestral adaptation of the score, which was the music I knew. In 1986, I watched on television as Barry Douglas played the original version in Moscow, on his way to winning the Tchaikovsky Piano Prize. I still listen to his recording, released the following year.
Mussorgsky wrote the piece to celebrate the artist Viktor Hartmann, after visiting a memorial exhibition of his dead friend’s work. He created ten sound pictures each of which suggests the experience of looking at paintings in a gallery. The music describes the feelings and thoughts of the viewer of the images. The ten sections of the piece are each named and, therefore, I suppose that it would be possible to find specific images of Hartmann’s work to which each section of the music corresponds. One could listen to a recording of the music while looking at reproductions of the paintings that Mussorgsky himself saw. But what would be the point? The music is not intended to be purely illustrative; rather, it is itself a genuine source of aesthetic experience, with its own form, character and integrity. I do not need to know what Mussorgsky saw, rather I want to listen closely to how he tried to express the sense of what he felt about what he had seen.
In my bedroom I have a framed watercolour painting on the wall. The work is abstract but has the feel and form of a landscape. At the base are loosely painted markings, browns and earth colours, with a hint of blue. In the centre are three strong, angular, interlocking forms – all irregular quadrilaterals – in yellow, dark brown and light brown, which might be representations of hills or ridges, seen from a distance, partly in shade. Above them, in the top third of the image, two swooping washes of colour – inverted rainbow shapes but all blue and indigo – suggest the sky just after heavy rain. A hint of yellow, mostly overpainted, brings to my mind the bright rays of the sun, struggling to reassert themselves against the wetness of the air. In the morning, when I wake, the dawn light, filtered by my curtains, illuminates the picture, drawing my mind into the landscape, the weather, the thrill and pleasure of the natural world. It reminds me of the experience of hope when, out on a long walk, just after a rain shower has passed, the warmth of the reemergent sun promises to dry my face and hair. I like to spend some moments looking at this painting in the gentle light of early morning: it makes me want to get out of bed and reengage with the world once again.
Re-reading the previous three paragraphs makes me realise how hard it is to write about music and art. I can describe my encounter with Mussorgsky’s music, but I would find it impossible to capture what it feels like to listen to an orchestra or a pianist, in full flow, bringing Hartmann’s exhibition to life. I can describe formal features of the painting that hangs on my wall, but I cannot reproduce the experience of looking, of the indulgent pleasure I take when my eyes wander across this rectangle of watercolours, bathed in light. Writing is not the same as listening or looking; second-hand impressions are not the same as direct experience; music and painting move us in ways that are impossible faithfully to describe.
Just as I am not able to put adequately into words what the orchestral sounds and the watercolour brushstrokes make me feel, so too a composer cannot write a sonata that expresses love quite in the same way that a poet does in a sonnet; nor can a portraitist capture a person’s character in the same way that a novelist does. Art takes many forms and they are not directly translatable, which means that that are not substitutable. What works well in one format might fail in another and, pace Wagner, there is no such thing as a total artwork: sometimes the combinations of word, music and image produce experiences that are exhilarating; and sometimes they seem pointless and superfluous. Nor are there final works – which exhaust a subject or make the definitive statement on a theme – there is always more to say, to reinterpret, to revise, to show again what has been shown before. Someone who thinks that having seen one sunset, they have no need to see another, is just wrong. So too, someone who has once felt fear, or love, or hope, or regret; so too someone who has once laughed with joy. Once is never enough. Art is necessary not just because memory is fragile, but also because, in the suitably obscure words of Heraclitus, on those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.
There is a saying that artists must lie in order to show us the truth. I prefer a more nuanced version of this idea, that the deliberate misrepresentation of reality is often the best route to understanding reality; that distortion helps us to see more clearly. Consider the map: it is a tool, and it works not by copying reality accurately, but by a form of systemic distortion. An architect’s plan of a building, or a map for hiking in the countryside, is only useful because the scale is changed. (I’m sure I once read a short story about a map with a scale of 1:1, probably by Borges. The story was good, but the map wasn’t.) Other maps work because they falsify some aspect of the world to help us with another aspect. Suppose you are on the London Underground, travelling from Euston to Kings Cross: if you are on the Victoria line you are heading north, if you are on the Northern line you are heading south. If you were at street level, you are heading east. (If you are heading west, then you are taking a very long way around.) The underground map is not true, but it is useful: it helps us to navigate the city.
Art helps us to navigate life. It does so not by showing us how the world truly is – although it does that too, sometimes – but by helping us to imagine other possibilities. It opens our minds – little by little, day by day – to see, hear, read and understand more about how life might be lived. It extends our vision, broadens our minds, it deepens our sensitivities; and it also exhausts our vocabulary of metaphors. When I listen to music, especially the best music, and when I look at painting, especially the best painting, and when I read literature, especially the best literature, my imagination is educated, and my sympathies extended; this helps to make me a better person.
I recognise that I am making two big claims here: first that we can distinguish between better and worse in art; second that the better the art the greater the chance of moral improvement. I think both claims are true, although not necessarily easy or obvious to explain. It is evident that taste in art changes, and the work of writers, painters, composers is constantly being re-evaluated. The lack of stable, settled opinions about what counts as great literature, painting or music does not detract from the claim that such greatness exists, and is worth seeking out. On the contrary, the process of puzzling out why one work might be better than another – whether this is a private discussion we have with ourselves, or a public debate that we follow and perhaps contribute to – is at the same time a process that forces us to consider what it is we finding pleasing, challenging, uplifting, provocative and rewarding in the work. Simply accepting artworks as interesting (or not) but incomparable, as examples but never exemplars of a genre, is a sure recipe for not reading, looking or listening as carefully and critically as one might. If I show you five apples and ask you which is the ripest, you will look at them much more closely than if I simply ask you how many apples there are. Judgments of quality require attention.
My experience of art is that, at its best, it makes me think harder about my world and how I should live. It enlarges my sense of the variety of lived experience, forces me to acknowledge that the perspective I have is rooted in and limited by the vantage point I occupy, disrupts some of the convenient and lazy assumptions I have acquired about life, prods me to think and act differently. My encounter with art at its best makes me want to live my life to the best. As Rilke wrote, after viewing with wonder a Greek statue of the torso of Apollo: you must change your life.
I recognise that this experience is not universally true. There are some people for whom the motivation to do well, to do better, comes from friends or family, from religious or moral beliefs, from the need to compete or the desire for fame and fortune. Art is not the only source of moral energy. And, I am aware too that there are people who spend their lives involved in the arts – as makers, or buyers, or critics – but who are deeply immoral in the way that they live. Art can corrupt as well as improve. What is true for one is not true for all, and for some is plainly false: nonetheless, that art might be a path to virtue is true for me.
I recently watched John Huston’s film version of James Joyce’s short story The Dead. Joyce wrote the story when he was twenty-five at the start of his stellar career as a writer; Huston made the film when he was eighty, it was his final film and he died before it was released. The story and the film end with a man in middle age reflecting, as he watches the snow fall on a winter’s night in Dublin, on the death of a younger man years before. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. It is a melancholy, but moving finale to a wonderful narrative about achievement, acknowledgement and aging. Coincidentally, re-reading Elena Ferrante’s quartet of books, known as the Neapolitan Novels, I was struck by a comment the narrator makes, near to the conclusion of the story, about her lifelong friend: Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project, she writes, recalling that her friend had once said: I want to leave nothing, my favourite key is the one that deletes.
Both these thoughts, drawn from my reading, came to my mind a couple of days ago as I listened to another of my favourite orchestral works, Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. This piece was written in New York in the mid-1940s as Bartók was dying of leukaemia, a refugee from fascism in Europe. It is a work of sadness, with many sombre moments, but concludes with intimations of optimism. Bartók did not want to leave nothing. He had lived by transforming the music of his country, especially the folk music of Hungary, into complex works that are now central to the modern classical canon. He wrote his last work in the full glory of some passion, knowing the true horrors of the war years, but nevertheless believing in the possibility of hope. His Concerto is a sobering work, but also a noble and courageous one. Just like the watercolour on my bedroom wall, it challenges me every day to wake up and to do better.
Lovely!