WHEN INK MEETS MUSIC
Sound of Music, the second edition of City Fantasy ink series, features 15 most legendary composers of all time with a choice of novel colours inspired by the story we missed about them, their cities and their groundbreaking pieces.
Bach’s music never ages and has fascinated musicians, composers and performers, and listeners generation after generation, with rewritings and reinterpretations of his music continuously budding from all genres. In celebrating the annual Bach Festival under the theme of ‘BACH – We are Family’ in 2020, there will be a budding forest for Bach just south of Leipzig, signifying the inexhaustible influence of this absolute Father of Music..
Well-known by his most popular portrait in a red tunic, Mozart is a true child prodigy who produced some 600 works until his death at the tender age of 35. Classic Red fervently expresses the provocative, eloquent, and a simply very charismatic emotion of the genius.
Born in Lucca of Italy, Giacomo Puccini is the most prominent composer of Italian opera in his day. Icy Blue is inspired by Turandot, Puccini’s final and unfinished opera. The beautiful but icy princess Turandot challenged her many suitors to answer three riddles and no one ever succeeded. The third riddle is “What is like ice yet burns?” The answer is “Turandot”, cold and cruel who rejects love in her life and yet with warm blood flowing through her veins.
The incredibly popular Symphony No.5, written in the ‘heroic period’ (1802-1812) of Beethoven, with its phenomenal opening motif Da-Da-Da-DUM, is often referred to as ‘fate knocking at the door’ when he was approaching deafness. The pink Beethoven House in the centre of Bonn, thebirthplace of the great composer, has housed the largest and most diverse collection of the composer in the world. 2020 is the 250th birthday of the music hero.
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” reads the biblical passage inscribed on a pillar in Warsaw’s sprawling and ornate baroque Church of the Holy Cross. There, inside a crystal urn filled with alcohol, lies Chopin’s heart, brought home in 1849 – as he had wished – by his elder sister from Paris, where the rest of his remains lie in Paris cemetery. 2020 marks his 210 years’ birth anniversary – “hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”
As a lion of the keyboard and a fledgling composer, Franz Liszt took virtuoso piano technique to its limits with very demanding, physical, and rapid finger passagework. He was renowned for his emotionally charged performances and was known to use his colored hearing in his orchestral compositions. When Liszt was the conductor of an orchestra in Weimar in 1842, he said to the orchestra to play the tone in a little bluer way, ‘O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!’
Born and lived in the music capital of Vienna, Johann Strauss II wrote his greatest hit “The Blue Danube”, which has been regarded as an unofficial national anthem of Austria. Strauss recalled that the title had been inspired by a poem of an Austrian poet Karl Isidor Beck, with each stanza ended with ‘by the Danube, beautiful blue Danube’!
Audience were carried away by the melodious and breath-taking music of the unusual ballet Swan Lake (1876), a fairy tale of Prince Siegfried who, by an enchanted lake of tears with a flotilla of swans, met and fell in love with the cursed swan princess Odette.Dive into the sentimental green to commemorate the 180th birth anniversary of the great composer.
Boléro is the world’s most performed work and a timeless hit by Maurice Ravel, the French impressionist composer. It is built on a single repeated rhythm played on a snare drum until the pent-up tension is finally released by gradually looping in more powerful sonorities. Boléro Red reveals the determined and powerful spirit of the composer..
Water flows in and around the port city of Hamburg, the birthplace of Johannes Brahms, with waves and seagulls as well as container ships and boats dropping anchors and set off to sea again – the beauty of the maritime blue and the lively city rhythm draw us into the great composer’s most well-recognized works of folk music with lilting and jubilant energy.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in a village near Busseto, and La Traviata is probably one of his most popular operas. The shade of Violet Red conjures up the life of debauchery of the main character, Violetta, as a famed courtesan who didn’t want to give up her way of life, but was finally awakened by her desire to be truly loved.
Born in the Czech village in the region of Bohemia, Antonin Dvořák was the first Bohemian composer to achieve worldwide recognition, noted for turning folk material into 19th-century Romantic music. Bohemian Purple sparks creativity and resonates with the composer’s works that incorporate a broad palette of moods.
Known as the Son of Norway, Edvard Grieg composed music for the premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt at the request of the author. The calming pale green colour is inspired by the ‘Morning mood in the desert’, Act 4 of the play, depicting the dawn of the Moroccan desert where Peer Gynt was stranded after his companions had abandoned him there while he slept.
Not a child prodigy but a gradual developer, Edward Elgar gained recognition of his talents until his forties and became popular in Britain and overseas. His music reached the pinnacle of British society with royal audiences and he was the first British musician to be knighted. The blue medal at his birthplace in Worcester was once stolen in 2019 and has been recovered and displayed in 2020.
Georges Bizet, the French Romantic composer, is best known for the world’s favorite opera ‘Carmen’ – the sensual and passionate Carmen, a cigarette gypsy woman from the sun-soaked Seville where orange trees filled the city with an improbably fragrant and incredibly romantic atmosphere, has wrapped the audience in this warm and vibrant embrace.
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