The Yellow Sound
The Yellow Sound (Der Gelbe Klang) is a stage composition by Wassily Kandinsky, involving pantomime, an instrumental ensemble, soprano solo, and a mixed choir. It was published in the famous almanac The Blue Rider (1912). According to Kandinsky, it is a synthetic work combining color, movement, speech, and music (pantomime, colored projectors, orchestra, and singers). Kandinsky's libretto is plotless, reflecting the abstract art whose theoretician and forefather he was. The publication in The Blue Rider also contains a detailed lighting plot and instructions on the nature of music and pantomime movements.
The genre of "stage composition" was theoretically justified by Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. This work frequently states the idea of artistic synthesis, and the word is defined as "the inner sound." The concept of "yellow" is also the focus of the book's theoretical development. It makes "the first great contrast" with blue: yellow is warm, oriented toward the viewer, moving outward (eccentrically); blue is cold, oriented away from the viewer, inward (concentrically).
Following Kandinsky's libretto, Alfred Schnittke wrote a dual-purpose composition: it could be either staged or performed in a concert with reproductions of Kandinsky's paintings. All six paintings from Kandinsky's libretto were retained in the music; there is also a small amount of verbal text for the characters and the symbolic key sounds *a* and *h*. By the nature of its musical content, Schnittke's composition develops concentrically — from well-defined melodics in Part I to its gradual dissolution into aleatory and improvisatory passages in the center, later gradually restoring its melodic pattern toward the end. It is framed by a sonoristic introduction and conclusion.
Kandinsky's libretto was first set to music by the artist's collaborator, the Russian composer with a German surname, Thomas de Hartmann. A new version was made by the bandleader of the Regtime Ensemble, composer and director Gunther Schuller, who premiered it in the early 1980s in New York. The Yellow Sound was also staged in Paris with music by Anton Webern. In the USSR, it was first performed at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on January 6, 1984.
Premiere and notable performances:
- May 12, 1972 – Guggenheim Museum, New York City (United States)
- March 4, 1976 – Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris
- February 9, 1982 – Marymount Manhattan Theatre, New York City
- September 7–8, 1982 – Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main
- January 6, 1984 – Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Moscow
- February 12–15, 1987 – Bern Theatre, Bern (Switzerland)
- March 21, 1992 – NIA Centre, Manchester (U.K.)
- November 2010 – Target Margin Theatre Co., The Brick Theater, New York City
- April 10, 2011 – Palazzo dei Congressi, Lugano (original score by Carlo Ciceri)
American production – based on the original score by Thomas de Hartmann, realized by Gunther Schuller. French production – music by Anton Webern. Russian production – music by Alfred Schnittke
