# Official Composer Portraits



## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

I like the young images because I like to think of them at their most youthful and energetic and exciting time of life. Without the works of their younger days, there wouldn't be late works.

But what do you think should be the official portrait of each composer?

*Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685 - 1750*









*Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770 - 1827*









*Johannes Brahms, 1833 - 1897*









*Richard Wagner, 1813 - 1883*









*Franz Schubert, 1797 - 1828*


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

I believe that Bach portrait is hotly disputed in some circles, but it's always been my favorite of his too. That young Brahms photo is also great. As for Wagner I always liked this one:









Love the Bohemian garb.


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## Malx (Jun 18, 2017)

Is Wagner wearing his Covid mask inappropriately in that image


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## MrMeatScience (Feb 15, 2015)

Fortunately we have several images of the young Mahler (including a few of his childhood!); this one is flattering (unlike some others..) and is a good representation of how he looked ca. the Symphony No. 1.


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## Skakner (Oct 8, 2020)

Nice thread!

My choices...

*BACH*










*BEETHOVEN*










*BRAHMS*










*MAHLER*










*WAGNER*


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## Skakner (Oct 8, 2020)

*BRUCKNER*










*CHOPIN*










*LISZT*


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Just a question: what composer was the first to be photographed? Anyone know? I would think Chopin or Liszt, but who knows.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

mbhaub said:


> Just a question: what composer was the first to be photographed? Anyone know? I would think Chopin or Liszt, but who knows.


There's some old ones of Schumann...


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

some more.....

Satie on the lash...









Dvorak on a picnic









Feldman on a train









Rachmaninov on his birthday. Note the all female audience. Either that or a mate OD'd on the strippergrams









Wagner and dynasty on his patio


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

The Passions of Bach 
June 4th, 2010

















"Today is the 317th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's birth. Morning Edition host Bob Edwards uses the occasion to discuss Bach's passions - in life and music - with Miles Hoffman, a commentator on NPR's Performance Today and artistic director of the American Chamber Players.

Hoffman says it's important to remember that - unlike the classic portrait showing Bach as "bewigged, bejowled, stout and stolid" old man - the composer was once "a handsome, dashing guy." Much of Bach's best-loved music, including the Brandenburg Concertos and the pieces for solo violin and cello "were written when he was a young man in his 30s," Hoffman tells Edwards.

Hoffman makes that point in the following essay, appropriately titled "Johann Sebastian Bach Was Handsome Once":

When people discuss the music of Bach, words like "God" and "transcendence" tend to figure in the discussion. Gustav Mahler wrote that "in Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God," and Goethe said of Bach's music, "it was as if the eternal harmony was conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God, just before the creation of the world." (Goethe's version of the Big Bang theory.)

And certainly it's true for Bach, as literary critic Harold Bloom has said it is for Shakespeare, that the only legitimate approach is to "begin by standing in awe… Wonder, gratitude, shock, amazement are the accurate responses."

The only problem with this approach is that we tend to forget that Bach was a human being. And for me, the key to understanding the greatness of Bach is to recognize that what propels his music, what infuses every note, is his very human passion. Whether it's sacred music or secular, it's always passionate. Indeed, it's important to remember that the emotions that find their expression in religion, or in religious texts and musical settings, are but variants of the feelings common to all people: love, longing, fear, devotion, peace, excitement, expectation, comfort, joy, and so forth. There's no question that Bach had extraordinary skill - skill for which the word genius is too weak - but it's almost as if he was so skilled that his skill became irrelevant: listening to his music, I often have the impression that Bach somehow skipped the middle man, that his thoughts, his passion, his passions, simply emerged as music.

The truth, however, is that to most people it never occurs that Bach was a passionate man. And why not? Because of one portrait. The only authenticated portrait of Bach shows him as an old man - bewigged, bejowled, stout and stolid. This is the portrait everybody knows, the portrait of the serious, solemn, even severe "old master" who played the organ and taught counterpoint to generations of children at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Looking at this portrait, it's not hard to imagine that Bach was great, but it is hard to imagine that he was ever young. Or slim. Or good-looking. But he was all those things. And more. He had 20 children, after all, and he didn't create them at the harpsichord. Many of the works we know and love, including most of his great instrumental works, Bach wrote in his twenties and thirties. We remember that he died at the age of 65, but somehow we forget that he wasn't born at 65. He always had quite a temper, was no stranger to scraps with his employers, and as a young man he once even managed to get himself into a sword fight.

What led me to these considerations of Bach's passion was another portrait, much less well known and, alas, not authenticated. But it will do. Staring out from this portrait is a young Bach, a handsome Bach, a dashing, intense man. I felt, as soon as I saw this portrait, that it offered a key to understanding both the man and the music."


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

one more...

Tchaikovsky on a winter's eve

View attachment 146243


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Well, in view of the fact that it's almost his birthday:


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)




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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

mikeh375 said:


> Feldman on a train


I think that's my favourite!!


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

...and for you AB....

Britten on a tennis court....good forearm smash eh.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Not an official one, but I rather like the slightly dishevelled look! Nothing a cuppa can't fix...


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Mozart portrait miniature of 'virtually unparalleled' importance to be sold








"With his pink cheeks and bright eyes Mozart looks positively cherubic, the very picture of a young man in love.
The image is contained in an incredibly rare portrait miniature, reproduced in colour for what is thought to be the first time and about to be sold at auction after centuries of being passed down through generations of the same family.
Sotheby's announced that it was to sell one of only two Mozart portraits which remain in private hands, with the auction house's head of books and manuscripts describing the object's significance as "virtually unparalleled".
He said the artist had caught the very essence of Mozart. "He looks directly out at you, whereas there are lots of portrait miniatures where their eyes might as well be closed. This is different. He engages you … it is very open and friendly. You are looking at a real person."
The 21-year-old composer gave the portrait to his 18-year-old cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, with whom he had a fleeting affair, probably his first.
He almost certainly had affection for her, although it is difficult to discern given his letters to her do not bear too much repeating. "They're quite scatological," said Roe, and for want of a better word, filthy.
The portrait, given as a love token, clearly meant a lot to Maria Anna, given that it was found among her belongings when she died in 1841, aged 82. "She kept it for 70-odd years, which is touching," said Roe."


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

mbhaub said:


> Just a question: what composer was the first to be photographed? Anyone know? I would think Chopin or Liszt, but who knows.


Those are very good bets.

Certainly NOT a candidate for an official portrait, but a touching one of the severely sick Donizetti with his compassionate nephew (1847):


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

For my money, nothing beats Mussorgsky's deathbed portrait.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

Mahler.


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

I think I've said here before that my favourite portrait of a composer is that of Monteverdi's:










Gravitas is the word. Like being in the presence of one of the Old Masters.


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## Taplow (Aug 13, 2017)

mikeh375 said:


> ...and for you AB....
> 
> Britten on a tennis court....good forearm smash eh.
> 
> View attachment 146247


I could not help but notice the bare-chested young lad in the background of this photograph. A fitting subtext for a portrait of this composer, methinks.*

* No judgement intended, simply an observation.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

Here's something genre-specific. A chart of picked portraits:







plus other ones I like:


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I couldn't help notice Fabulin had a tiny RVW photo in his montage. My own choice as a 'folder icon' on my hard disk:









It's the cat that gets me every time, and the look of utter contentment on Ralph's face!


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## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I couldn't help notice Fabulin had a tiny RVW photo in his montage. My own choice as a 'folder icon' on my hard disk:
> 
> View attachment 146335
> 
> ...


RVW's cat was, unsurprisingly, called Foxy.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

David Phillips said:


> RVW's cat was, unsurprisingly, called Foxy.


I knew she had a name and I was going to look it up, but then I got sidetracked by cooking dinner and an idiot post on racism in music. So... thank you for saving me the trouble! I think he had several in the course of his lifetime, but Foxy was his special one.

There's a post hereabouts about what makes a great composer. I think a love of cats is a pretty important ingredient!

And don't cite me this one please:









There are a myriad contradictions we have to put up with in life. That's one of mine!!


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

hammeredklavier said:


> "With his pink cheeks and bright eyes Mozart looks positively cherubic, the very picture of a young man in love."


It tickles me reading this, knowing that's what the culture of enlightenment thought of a young man being well-powdered.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

A young Ives.









Later captain of the baseball team and varsity football player at Yale; hailed a possible champion sprinter.

I like Ives personally but I do know of people who wished he had gone on to become that champion sprinter rather than compose!


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Ethereality said:


> It tickles me reading this, knowing that's what the culture of enlightenment thought of a young man being well-powdered.


This is also interesting:
"We also read in Nannerl's memoirs that Mozart was "small, thin, pale in color, and entirely lacking in any pretensions as to physiognomy and bodily appearance. Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Mozart's leading pupil, said of him that "he was small of stature and of a rather pale complexion; his physiognomy had much that was pleasant and friendly , combined with a rather melancholy graveness ; his large blue eyes shone brightly. The tenor Michael Kelly, who sang the role of Don Basilio in the first production of _The Marriage of Figaro_, remembered that Mozart as a "remarkable small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine hair of which he was rather vain." In 1785 the Englishman John Pettinger went to visit Mozart as the composer was working on some quartets. Pettinger reports, "I was surprised, when he rose to find him of not more than about five feet and four inches in height and of very slight build. . . . His face was not particular striking, rather melancholy until he spoke, when his expression became animated and amused and his eyes . . . were full of kind concern in our doings about which he inquired with obvious interest." < Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography , By Piero Melograni , Page 186 >


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> There's a post hereabouts about what makes a great composer. I think a love of cats is a pretty important ingredient!
> And don't cite me this one please:
> View attachment 146347


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

^^^ I've never seen the Stravinsky one with the cat. He looks like he's enjoying things! Nice one...


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

The Tchaikovsky and Mozart portraits inside make it very meta.


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## Gold Member (Aug 23, 2021)

Ahh the video I've been waiting for all my life!


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## leonsm (Jan 15, 2011)




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