The word 'portrait' usually refers to a visual representation of a person, be it a painting, a drawing or a photograph. Portraits are, by necessity, single, frozen images, but humans are animate beings and our personalities are expressed by movement. I don't just mean the play of our facial expressions, but our characteristic gestures and the rhythm and intonation of our speech. Arguably, therefore, music is a better medium for capturing personality, and for hundreds of years composers have enjoyed creating musical portraits.
François Couperin (1668-1733) was perhaps the greatest of the French Baroque composers. Hidden amongst his works are a wealth of short, piquant portraits, not just of people but of moods, emotions and incidents. They are often accompanied by suggestive titles, though he issued them with a disclaimer: "The pieces which carry such titles are portraits, which have been found on occasion to be remarkable likenesses, and the flattering titles are intended for the amiable originals which I have sought to portray."
In many cases there seems to be little connection between the titles and the pieces to which they belong, so Couperin is telling us that when he names a work La Séduisante he is not claiming the piece itself is seductively beautiful but that the unnamed lady who inspired it is. Some pieces take their titles from a particular quality of the subject, some from a first name and some from a first name and descriptive adjective (for example La Babet, or Le Tendre Nanette). None, however, allow us to positively identify a subject.
The Classical period produced very few keyboard pieces with descriptive titles. CPE Bach (1714-1788), however, composed twenty-eight musical portraits of friends and acquaintances between 1754 and 1757. He had a personal collection of over three hundred painted portraits of composers, musicians and writers, and believed that music could produce portraits which were analogous to painting. His examples, in variants of rondo form, were intended to represent a subject's character rather than a physical likeness.
New audiences encountering these pieces after his death continued to interpret them as portraits, despite being unfamiliar with the sitters. The use of the feminine article 'la' before each name has led many to assume the subjects were women (my own favourite being La Caroline, Wq. 117/39). However, since 'la' modifies the understood word 'pièce', one cannot tell the gender of the subject from the title. The CPE Bach scholar Darrell Berg believes many, such as the mercurial La Buchholtz (Wq. 117/24), are portraits of men.
You'll hear a great deal about the music of Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) this year, as 2010 marks the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. Rather less well documented are his improvisational flights of fancy, captured not on staves but in the writings of his paramour, George Sand. Several written sources do rave about his improvisational skills, and no less an artist than Eugène Delacroix, who was friends with the composer, claimed that his written compositions were but pale distillations of his improvisations.
Chopin used to amuse gatherings of his friends by improvising musical portraits of them, but there is only one recorded instance of a finished composition springing from these spontaneous creations. Curiously, the subject is not a human but one of George Sand's dogs, which chases its tail in the famous D flat Waltz (Op. 64, No. 1). More playful than many of the composer's other waltzes, Camille Bourniquel, one of Chopin's biographers, reminds us that he originally named the piece 'Petit Chien' (Little Dog).
The piano works of Robert Schumann (1810-1856) are largely musical expressions of literary themes and moods. Carnaval (Op. 9), written in September 1834, is a collection of short pieces which depict revelers at an imaginative and elaborate masked ball. One character after another takes centre-stage, and the work is often cited for its portraits. These include the girlfriend Schumann was soon to jilt, Ernestine von Fricken, the girlfriend he eventually married, Clara Wieck, and two contrasting self-portraits.
Schumann, who was of course bi-polar, portrayed himself as both the forceful Florestan and the poetic Eusebius. The movements representing Paganini and Chopin are really just evocations of their musical styles, but by promiscuously mixing real people with commedia dell'arte characters Schumann reflects in his titles the mad fantasy of the music. Spontaneity and invention coexist vividly, and Carnaval is one of his most popular piano pieces. It has been recorded by all the great pianists, from Rachmaninoff onwards.
Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) was a rival to the great nineteenth century virtuoso, Franz Liszt. He was a prolific composer and had a marked effect on the development of music in Russia, establishing the first system of professional training at a new Conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1862. His patroness, the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, had a summer villa on Kamenoi-Ostrow (Rocky Island), near St. Petersburg, and it was there that he composed twenty-four portraits of members of her circle between 1853 and 1854.
Sumfin' of Nuffin'
The twenty-second portrait became one of Rubinstein's most popular compositions. Looking at the page there is little of interest to see, but it's very easy to succumb to the movement's simple melody and lovable candour. It is by far the best of the Kamenoi-Ostrow portraits, and Mlle. Anne de Friedebourg (to whom the piece is dedicated) must have made quite an impression on the composer! Despite its initial success the work is largely now forgotten, but I do still see it in old piano anthologies from time to time.
The French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893) is primarily remembered for his Ave Maria, and the operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette. But he also taught us that portraits don't have to be flattering representations. His Funeral March of a Marionette is perhaps the most famous example of a curious genre of composition that includes such works as Alkan's Marcia Funèbre Sulla Morte d'un Pappagallo (for a dead parrot) and Lord Berners' Petite Marche Funèbre Pour une Tante à Héritage (for a rich aunt).
Gounod's piece was originally conceived as a portrait of the cranky and physically awkward critic Henry Fothergill Chorley (who had, in fact, been an early an ardent champion of Gounod's work!). With ebullient and puerile malice, Gounod had planned to hint at the piece's inspiration by dedicating it to Chorley, but the critic inadvertently thwarted him by dying before its publication. It later found a singularly appropriate niche as the theme to the macabre television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, between 1955 and 1962.
The Enigma Variations (Op. 36), by Edward Elgar (1857-1934), is of course an orchestral work, but Elgar conceived it while improvising at the piano. He imagined how a number of his friends would have written each variation, had he or she been a composer. It's hard to imagine one of his subjects putting pen to paper, though: Variation XI (G.R.S.) depicts a bulldog! (The dog didn't have three names. He was called Dan and the initials refer to his owner, George Robertson Sinclair, organist of Hereford Cathedral.)
Elgar described his scheme as "a quaint idea and the result is amusing to those behind the scenes and won't affect the hearer who 'nose nuffin'". In fact, he took great care that the hearer should know sumfin': he dedicated the work to 'my friends pictured within', and headed each movement with initials or some other identification of the subject. The work certainly deserves its success, but I wonder if it would have won its wide audience quite so readily had he not chosen to hint at its intriguing extra-musical inspiration?
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) composed musical portraits, most of which were for solo piano, throughout his career, and left more than one hundred and fifty examples spanning sixty years. In all but six cases, he actually had his subjects 'sit' for their portraits. Most were friends but, on occasion, he would accept commissions from strangers. He generally required himself to complete a portrait in a single session, working in silence for about an hour and a half, as he found this to be the best way of stimulating musical spontaneity.
This method distinguishes Thomson's portraits from those of earlier composers. He didn't stop to try ideas out at the piano, or to correct or criticise what he had written. Such adjustments were left for later, and depending on one's taste the sparse style of his portraits is either pithy and economical or dry and barren. Either way, many of his subjects felt that the pieces he wrote captured something unique about their identities, even though nearly all of the portraits are absent of any clearly representational content.
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) would often stay at a friend's country house in the town of Nazelles, near Tours. It was here that he played aux portraits (charades) around the piano. Like Chopin before him, he would capture each of the guests in an improvisation and a guessing game would follow to identify who was being depicted. He later published eight of the portraits as a cycle, Les Soirées de Nazelles. They are framed by a Préambule and Final, which was later identified by the composer as a self-portrait.
Like Schumann's caricatures, Poulenc's seem mostly to consist of surface features, virtuosic indulgences and charming entertainments. Brilliantly conceived and full of colour and contrast, Les Soirées de Nazelles is often cited as his most important work for solo piano. But Poulenc had a difficult relationship with the instrument, once saying: "It is the piano that somehow escapes me." He did like a few of his piano works, and tolerated others. But some, such as Les Soirées de Nazelles, he utterly dismissed in his later years.
Although a musical portrait can't ever project a physical likeness, as it has no visual component, clues such as the title can still inspire us to experience it as a representation of its sitter. And despite being unable to judge its 'physical' accuracy, the extra-musical aspect need not be lost to us. I hope that I've inspired you to explore some of this rich and unusual repertoire for yourself. If you do, see whether you can infer the subject's personality from the music. As an imaginative exercise, it has its own peculiar charm!
