Picturing Music in the Nineteenth Century

Although music has been conceived as an art of pure emotions and devoid of concepts, it has always gained its significance in intermedial contexts. The sense and impact of music are inevitably articulated through a medial transfer since music contains much more than its sonic aspect. Intermediality, however, that occurs in the interplay of music and its surrounding verbal discourses, remains routine-like or largely unnoticed within institutionalized forms such as music criticism, music history, and the like. By contrast, other intermedial effects of music become highly pronounced when the interplay of musical and linguistic medium is enriched by the involvement of other media, primarily visual ones. If, for example, music becomes the object of the depiction in a painting, we won’t necessarily approach the visual work in the same way as if the depiction was a mere commentary on a preexisting music phenomenon. “You’ll never look at music the same way again!” – as the slogan put it, back in the early days of Music Television. Although music videos provide an ample repository of visually hijacked, exploited, or intensified musical experiences, their medial dynamics cannot be held as novelties, at least as far as cultural modernity is concerned. This chapter searches for much earlier examples of the audiovisual experience. At the same time, it explores its aesthetic and historical preconditions and the workings of intermediality concerning several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical pictures.