Music: The World of Paul Klee

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 2)

¶ David Diamond's The World of Paul Klee, which had its premiere in 1958, was played by the New York Philharmonic under Assistant Conductor Seymour Lipkin. Each of Diamond's four musical pictures was introduced by a "frame," which served the same mood-setting function that Mussorgsky's "promenades" do in Pictures from an Exhibition. Like Schuller, Composer Diamond used Twittering Machine as the inspiration for one of his pieces, but he saw it in more somber tones: muted, dark-hued movements of the strings, with the picture's more jagged lines delineated by scampering woodwinds and brasses. Dance of the Grieving Child, a pen-and-ink sketch in which the child's sharply inclined head looks like an immense light bulb with umbrellas for filament, moved Diamond to a softly lyrical, dreamlike sequence in the strings, interrupted by brassy but tentative dissonances and finally fading limply into silence. The Black Prince, which consists principally of a juttingly regal nose and two moon-sized eyes surmounted by a crown, opened with somber, wispy cries of woodwinds and horns, gave way to impetuously flourishing passages in the brasses, died in a melancholy twitter of strings. Less fanciful than the Schuller works, Diamond's "pictures" were ultimately more moving and closer in feeling to Klee's own eerily dream-haunted visions.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. Next Page