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Text File | 1996-03-14 | 4.3 KB | 292 lines

@ Debussy's music is sometimes seen as the musical equivalent of the Impressionist painting, which was all the rage at the time. But some would say that Debussy's carefully- wrought effects have little in common with the broad effects and superficiality of Impressionism # The Faune is now seen as a milestone in musical history. But as so often with Debussy's work, it was hated at the time. The composer Saint-Saens said: "It contains not the slightest musical idea in the real sense of the word. It's as much a piece of music as the palette a painter has worked from is a painting" # Debussy's masterpiece, Pell√©as et M√©llisande, was at first thought utterly tuneless. At the public dress rehearsal hecklers shouted "When will the orchestra stop tuning up?" and "Now give us some music!" # Les Jeux was one of the first ballets on a sporting theme. The combination of Debussy's music and Nijinsky's choreography was electrifying, and as this review points out, it was one of the first pieces of theatre to make conscious reference to the new art of cinematography # Debussy died in Paris on the 25th of March 1918, as German planes and Big Bertha guns rained bombs and shells on the city @ Surrealism emerged from Dada, an anti-art movement which challenged the accepted conventions of art. One of Dada's earliest exponents was Marcel Duchamp who worked on the principle that anything could be labelled art, Duchamp exhibited a 'signed' series of 'ready-mades' designed to pose the question "Is it art?" # The Surrealist movement encompassed many artists and many trends. Among them were the Belgian artist Rene Magritte, whose visual puns and understated jokes were a world away from the outrageous antics of Dali # Dali was indifferent to the political preoccupations of his surrealist colleagues and of his countrymen. "What do you think of communist growth during the last hundred years?" he was asked for this photograph. "From the point of view of hair on the face," he said, "there has been a steady decline." # In 1951 Dali announced "For me Surrealism is over". Shaken by Hiroshima, he proclaimed himself the "First Painter of the Atomic Age". His work now combined his two preoccupations: science and religion. In this carefully staged photo, "Atomicus", each object appears to be suspended like an atom in space # Dali's religious works of the Fifties and Sixties brought his work to a wider public. This painting, the subject of controversy when it was bought by Glasgow Art Gallery in 1952, was inspired by a drawing of Christ attributed to the 16th century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross @ The Beatles split was blamed by many on Yoko Ono. John doted on her, and Paul was deeply distrustful of her, But the two songwriters' paths had already diverged, and the worst that can be said of Yoko is that she hastened the group's demise # The once happy and fruitful Beatles partnership slid after the break- up into personal sniping and legal bickering. Lennon released a very poor song, How Do You Sleep, which was a bitter and vicious attack on Paul # After the Beatles fell apart the members moved on to other projects. Lennon moved to New York, Ringo Starr got interested in film, Harrison made some respectable albums in Britain , and McCartney, after a period of peace and quiet, re-emerged with what he called a working skiffle band - Wings # John Lennon was killed outside his home in New York. He had done little in the previous five years, but had just re-emerged with a new album. His death put paid to the perennial rumours that the Beatles were about to get back together # If prophetic photographs are anything to go by, it seems Lennon knew he would be the first Beatle to die. Sales in Beatles records naturally rocketed after his death, and with his corpus of work now complete, the appraisal of his legacy, with the Beatles and without them, could begin # Paul McCartney's solo output has remained impressive, but as with Lennon, the quality varied. Though both men strived to create a separate musical identity for themselves after the Beatles, neither could quite ever escape the shadow of their youthful moptopped selves