Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

  by  Emily E. Hogstad    December 28th, 2025 While they’re known primarily for their music, several iconic classical music composers also expressed their creativity through visual art. From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds. Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) Felix Mendelssohn Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist. He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils. It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture. Mendelssohn’s landscape painting During one fam...

By Janet Horvath , Interlude Musicians, like so many others, enjoy jokes, especially those that are puns related to music, composers, and musicians. Backstage, even onstage during rehearsals, these anecdotes, puns, and gags fly. Perhaps it’s because we spend so much time in a practice room, we get punchy and resort to joking about it. As students we start out with simple short quips: Why is a piano so hard to open? Because the keys are on the inside. What is the difference between a fish and a piano? You can’t tuna fish. Want to hear the joke about a staccato? Never mind. it’s too short. How do you fix a broken tuba? With a tuba glue. While gleaning knowledge of the finer points of theory, as we develop as musicians, and so do our jokes, becoming more sophisticated. Perhaps it’s less likely that the uninitiated will “get” the joke immediately. Like this one: Arnold Schoenberg walks into a bar, “I’ll have a gin please but no tonic.”  This jest is a favorite among musicians: C, ...

Arnold Schoenberg (September 13, 1874 - July 13, 1951) was one of the founders of musical Modernism, an incredibly influential figure from the early twentieth century to at least twenty-five years after his death – with  Stravinsky , one of the two most influential composers of his time. Even those fundamentally antithetical to atonality were moved to see musical aesthetics very much as he did. As a composer, Schoenberg largely taught himself, sometimes relying on the advice of his friend, the composer Alexander von Zemlinksy. Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde became Schoenberg's first wife. The marriage came close to foundering when Mathilde left Schoenberg for an artist. She returned, but the marriage never recovered. Nevertheless, when she died in 1923, Schoenberg was devastated. Still, he remarried quickly, this time choosing the sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, Gertrud. It was a love match. From the early twentieth century, Schoenberg was considered a leading light o...