Fashioned by Sargent an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 8, 2023–January 15, 2024, and Tate Britain, London, February 22–July 7, 2024.
Catalog of the exhibition by Erica E. Hirshler, with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, James Finch, and Pamela A. Parmal.
MFA Publications, 247 pp., $65.00
The Music Lovers
This is the painter John Singer Sargent, writing in 1880 to his friend Vernon Lee after a trip to Spain and North Africa:
You wished some Spanish songs. I could not find any good ones. The best are what one hears in Andalucia, the half African Malagueñas & Soleàs, dismal, restless chants that it is impossible to note. They are something between a Hungarian Czardas and the chant of the Italian peasant in the fields, and are generally composed of five strophes and end stormily on the dominant the theme quite lost in strange fiorituras and guttural roulades. The gitano voices are marvellously supple.
If you have heard something of the kind you will not consider this mere jargon.
What strikes one is the assumption of shared expertise. Had Sargent heard these dismal, restless chants? He seems to have. Had he tried but failed to notate them? A prodigious task for an amateur. Had he counted the strophes and noted the stormy endings on the dominant? It is hard to see, in any of his biographies, where he would have received the kind of musical education that might have enabled him to dash down a useful transcription of a fioritura, let alone a guttural roulade.
This is one of the mysteries of Sargent and Vernon Lee (the British writer who is always referred to by her full nom de plume rather than her given name, Violet Paget). Born, both of them, in 1856, into the expatriate world of the great Italian cities and the shabbier culture of the minor European spas, they had somehow devised their own educations on the hoof. They were both multilingual, but Vernon Lee did not have the remotest connection with university or college life. Sargent was clearly destined to be an artist, and in due course he took the conventional first steps, enrolling in a reputable Paris atelier and exhibiting at the Salon.
But he was also, to a mysterious degree, a musician. One thinks at first: Oh, but everyone in that world, in those days, was a musician in some sense. Then we learn that Sargent’s talents gravitated toward the fiendishly difficult end of the repertoire: he could play Isaac Albéniz’s piano suite Iberia (1905–1909). That alone puts him in the elite. According to the violinist Joseph Joachim, he could have been a professional musician. Sometimes it was said of Sargent that he did not necessarily play all the notes but had a gift for seizing on what was essential. That in itself would have been a sign of profound musicality. It offered a way of responding to the occasion. Supposing, for instance, a group of friends were sight-reading a four-hand piano transcription of Wagner’s Ring (the kind of thing Sargent’s circle liked to do), they might be grateful to have him as first piano, giving impetus to the rest.
Vernon Lee did not havestories as legends. But at first the arrival at her home of these laboriously copied scores produced in Vernon Lee an anxiety so intense that she could not bear to hear the music directly, as her mother played it for her benefit. She had to listen from the next room or through an open window.
