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[Let's Talk About Music] | PAUL KLEE | EP1-3: "In the Style of Bach" - Klee, the Past and the Future

Updated: Sep 4

This post contains a full transcript of the lecture video below. To accommodate the content of the video to the blog post format, 1. some images of photos or artworks from the video have been left out, 2. I have separated sections of the text with headings that are not in the video, and 3. each time an artist or composer is first mentioned, their full name and birth/death years are included. The rest of the text from the video, however, is unedited and in its entirety.

[Let's Talk About Music] | PAUL KLEE | EP1-3: "In the Style of Bach" - Klee, the Past and the Future

In all my videos covering Paul Klee, the music I play is by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), German composer from the 18th Century who you might recognize for classics including Air on G, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring among others.


A 1784 painted portrait of German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. A middle-aged white man with a serious expression, wearing a white curly-haired wig, is dressed in a black jacket over a white blouse. In his right hand he holds a piece of sheet music, which is the canon BWV 1076, one of his compositions.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

In terms of compositional technique, Bach is remembered for his skills in polyphonic writing, such as his inventions and fugues.


Paul Klee's 1919 painting "In the Style of Bach", done in oil transfer and watercolor on chalk base, applied to linen on cardboard. An abstract painting in a mostly pale-green hue, with subtle hues of pink and blue. Scattered across the painting are abstract figures and icons, outlined in black and in hues of mostly red and yellow.
Im Bachschen Stil ("In the Style of Bach"). 1919. Oil transfer and watercolor on chalk base applied to linen on cardboard.

This is Klee’s In the Style of Bach, painted in 1919.


An oil transfer drawing and watercolor painting, done on chalk base applied to linen and cardboard.


Positioned at the far left, almost like a clef on a musical stave, is what looks like a person playing a wind instrument, with a blue crescent moon slightly above. Scattered across a pale green background, with subtle hues of pink and blue, are little red “icons”: plants, stars of different shapes, a musical symbol known as the fermata, and several more. The way these “icons” are positioned could imply a sort of progression - almost like a language, or even musical notation.


“In the Style of Bach” could mean a lot of things.


Is this just a fancy re-interpretation of sheet music?


Is this what Klee personally felt or imagined while listening to Bach?


Is this a technical visualization of Bach’s music, like his polyphonic paintings?


What is the “Style of Bach” to Klee? Could it have been something personal?



A musical identity . . . but not in the present


As a European artist in the early 20th Century, Paul Klee was active in an era in which visual artists, such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and many more, were actively working together with composers on the stage, or even the screen.


Klee’s contemporaries in the music world include modern music giants such as Béla Bartók (1881-1945), Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), the Second Viennese School, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and more.


And yet - Klee never officially collaborated with or built close relationships with any living composers from his own time.


Klee’s lack of association with the contemporary music world, professional and personal, cannot be ignored. If music was so important to Klee, why didn’t he interact with composers?



The end of music and beginning of art


A sepia photograph of German artist Paul Klee at the age of twelve. A young boy looking slightly to the left, wearing what appears to be a tweed jacket and vest and a tie.
Klee at age 12.

Klee started the violin at the age of 7, studying with the then-concertmaster of the orchestra of the Bern Music Association. Throughout his childhood, his parents - a music teacher and a professional singer - supported his musical activities, and it appeared as if Klee would continue to pursue music into adulthood.


A black-and-white photograph of German artist Paul Klee at the age of twenty. A young man wearing a long trench coat over what appears to be a suit and necktie, as well as dark-colored gloves on his hands. In his left hand he holds a hat.
Klee at age 20.

However, as a teenager, Klee made the decision to start a career not in music, but in art. The reason? In his own words, he found “the idea of going in for music creatively not particularly attractive in view of the decline in the history of musical achievement.”


Based on his diary entries in his early twenties, Klee clearly struggled to enjoy or identify with the music of his time.



Paul Klee's 1909 painting "Pianist in Need", done in pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard. A bald and naked man wearing glasses is sitting in front of a brown, old-fashioned piano with sheet music in front of his face. He faces away from the viewer and is only visible from the back, though his hunched-up posture and shriveled-up skin suggests great suffering. He is trapped to the piano's keyboard with metal or gold cuffs, and is sitting on what appears to be a chamber pot.
Pianist in Not ("The Pianist in Need"). 1909. Pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard.

This is Klee’s 1909 painting The Pianist in Need, done in pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard. The striking image of the shriveled-up pianist, chained to his instrument and sitting on what appears to be a chamber pot, has viewers believing this to be Klee’s scathing opinion on new music: confined, twisted, nauseating.


Klee did not pursue music as his future - because he did not see a future in music. Music was something of the past.


Klee’s inspirations were mainly two composers from the past: Bach, and 18th Century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).



A Future in Art, for Music of the Past


Even after deciding not to pursue music professionally, Klee continued to enjoy music in his own way. He played Bach and Mozart on his violin, with his wife Lily on piano, and watched concerts and operas. With Bach specifically, he studied his style and technique extensively, and even incorporated his analysis of Bach’s music in his Bauhaus teachings.


Klee's graphic analysis of the fourth movement of the sixth violin sonata by Johann Sebastian Bach. A horizontally long graph consisting of multiple rows and columns, the very top row being a musical stave containing the musical notes of the piece. Further down the graph, certain cells are filled in black, mapping out the trajectory of the music based on Klee's analysis of the music.
Klee's analysis of the fourth movement from J. S. Bach's Violin Sonata No. 6 in G Major, taken from his notebooks containing his lecture notes. Between 1921 to 1922.

But it would be superficial to simply imply that Klee liked older music because of nostalgia, or based on conservative musical values.


In a diary entry from 1917, the same one in which he declared polyphonic painting to be superior to music, Klee actually brings up Bach and Mozart - in an unusual take:



“Polyphony understood spatially has since given way to the final movement. Thus, a quintet like in Don Giovanni is closer to us than the epic movement in Tristan (…). Mozart and Bach are thus more modern than the nineteenth century.”


- Paul Klee, Tagebuchintrag, 1917



What could be “modern” about composers from the past? While developing his theory of art and music, Klee was clearly already approaching polyphony as the clue.


Here, Bach - master of polyphony - is no longer just an “inspiration”, but the key and heart of what would become Klee’s artistic vision.


In 1928, around 10 years later, Klee solidified this vision by declaring:



“. . . what was accomplished in music before the end of the eighteenth century has hardly begun in the pictorial field.”


- Paul Klee, “Bauhaus, Vierteijahrzeitschrift fur Gestaltung” vol.2, No.2, 1928



As a composer of art, Klee was continuing a legacy. While modern composers were creating new sounds, he took the music of the past, and created a future for it through art.



Klee, the Past . . . and the Future?


Perhaps from a musician’s point of view, Klee could be seen as someone “stuck in the past” or having old taste. Bach and Mozart’s music may be classic, but why not revolutionize the music scene by engaging with the music of your own time?


Except - has Klee’s style and method truly left no impact on the music scene? In developing a style derived not just from the past, but also through another medium, one could learn so much about music in ways that no trained musician could ever teach. How did Klee shape the future of music? What can we learn about music from Klee?



(To be continued in EP1-4)




Sources




Images and Photos


  • All images of artwork in this video are scans of either postcards or pages from books that I personally own.

    • In the Style of Bach was scanned from a postcard purchased at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.

      • Klee, Paul. im Bach’schen Stil. 1919. Art Unlimited Amsterdam. Printed in Holland. Postcard.

    • All other images: 

      • Hajo Düchting (translated into Japanese by Fumiko Goto).『パウル・クレー: 絵画と音楽 (“Paul Klee: Art and Music”)』. Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, 2009.

  • The images of composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were taken from their pages on Wikipedia.

  • All photos are scans of pages from books that I personally own.

    • Klee’s photos from his childhood:

      • Makoto Shindo.『もっと知りたいパウル・クレー 生涯と作品 (アート・ビギナーズ・コレクション) (“Want to Know More Paul Klee: Life and Works”)』. Tokyo Bijutsu Co.,Ltd., 2011.

    • All other photos:

      • Hajo Düchting (translated into Japanese by Fumiko Goto).『パウル・クレー: 絵画と音楽 (“Paul Klee: Art and Music”)』. Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, 2009.

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©2020 by Manaka Matsumoto, violin.

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