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The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers

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This slim, handsome, coffee-table book containing artistic impressions of 12 great composers with rich explanatory essays is an invitation to indulgence. Famed music critic James Huneker was commissioned by Steinway and Sons to write the texts illuminating the 12 paintings by American artists of famous composers for the pianoforte (and other instruments). The paintings remain on display in the Steinway Collection in Steinway Hall in New York. This flawless edition brings both paintings and essays, containing jewels of truths about the lives of the composers, is an ideal contribution to the study or browsing list of armchair devotees of classical music. It is a long awaited resurrection. The museum quality paintings are dark, looming, mysterious, even overwhelming, florid with imagery pertaining to the composition or composer depicted. Because of the need for reduction and color reproduction, these works of art by artists such as A. I. Keller, N. C. Wyeth, John C. Johansen, and Ernest Blumenschein, to mention a few, are the next best things to standing directly before them at the Stineways and Sons gallery. Their intended scale is monolithic. The essays paired with the painting shine clear and true like a beacon over the last eighty -five years. They are clearly the work of an iconographer. There is such mastery of the descriptive phrase, the rhapsodic experience of epiphanies, such brilliantly faceted mirrorings of the composers' works, all paraded in solemn dignity alongside the magnificent paintings. Truly the collection is a treasure. It remains an archetype of style of music criticism. Perhaps the most familiar portrait is the one of Liszt, painted by John C. Johansen. An elderly sublime performer, "he dreams of his past triumphs; of the three women who filled his life - Caroline St. Criq, Countess d'Agoult and Princess Wittgenstein; of his trials, sorrows and ultimate peace in the arms of Mother Church...The weary wonder worker has, like Prospero, laid down his wand; the wizard Merlin is in the toils of Time. Ring down the curtain, the comedy is ended (p. 14)!" The Steinway Collection, Paintings of Great Composers, with Essays by James Huneker is an enthusiastically recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library collections.

The famed piano-maker Steinway and Sons commissioned these 12 paintings of music greats of the 19th century--except for Handel from the 18th--in the early 1900s to participate in its way in "the golden age in American art and musical performance" [from the Foreword by David Dubal] from 1880 to 1920. This was a brief period when Rachmaninoff performed his own compositions at Carnegie Hall, and Mahler occasionally conducted the New York Philharmonic. Among the artists commissioned were N. C. Wyeth, Harvey Dunn, Carl Anderson, and Henry McCarter. The noted N. Y. Times music and art critic James Huneker was commissioned to write brief biographical and artistic essays for each painting. "The evocations of these musicians set forth by the brush of native painters and illustrators of renown," as Huneker writes in his Prelude, portray artists in scenes of inspiration for works of their or composing with the romantic images of their imagination in the background. This edition brings the original 1919 limited edition of Steinway and Sons to a wider audience.