George Kennaway - M. K. Čiurlionis

M K Čiurlionis

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911)

Opening of Druskininkai conference 2004: GK (R); Rimantas Astrauskas (L)

This page is under construction - it will offer information about Čiurlionis, links to the best available websites, and information about conferences, exhibitions and other events relating to him.

Brief Biography:

The Lithuanian composer and artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) was Lithuania's first important classical composer and was also a significant Symbolist artist. He is now a national institution in his native country. Chamber ensembles, music schools, a long-distance footpath, two mountains and an asteroid have all been named after him. The M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas, which houses nearly all his art and surviving musical manuscripts, is visited regularly by parties of tourists, and his music is central to the Lithuanian classical canon. His work is widely known in Eastern Europe and Russia, but is still largely unknown in the West.

The first professionally trained Lithuanian composer, he studied from 1889 to 1893 at Prince Mikhal Oginski’s music school in Plungė, in western Lithuania. After this, Oginski supported him at the Warsaw Conservatoire (1893-1899) and then at the Leipzig Conservatoire (1901-1902), where he studied with Reinecke and Jadassohn. From around 1903 he developed a serious interest in painting, which he studied at the Warsaw School of Art with members of the Sztuka group. From then until his death painting and musical composition occupied him equally. In his last years he sought recognition in St. Petersburg, with mixed success. Poverty and stress eventually led him to be admitted to a mental institution in Poland for the last year of his life – ironically, just at a time when his work was becoming known abroad. As a painter he is significant in the history of Russian symbolism and it was in this capacity that he first achieved recognition outside Lithuania. His piano works, on the other hand, were not published until 1925 and his orchestral works, though regularly performed, remained in manuscript until the 1960s. Only now are critical editions of his compositions being produced.

Čiurlionis's creative output amounts to some three hundred musical works and roughly the same number of works of art (mostly paintings in tempera on cardboard). His musical compositions are mostly short piano pieces, often simply entitled 'prelude', but he also wrote two orchestral tone-poems, some chamber music, and several liturgical works, as well as choral arrangements of Lithuanian folk songs. He gave many of his paintings - which were admired by by Stravinsky and Messiaen - musical titles, often grouping them in four-movement ‘sonatas’ with titles such as ‘Andante’, ‘Scherzo’ or ‘Allegro’. Sometimes he explicitly represented musical processes in painted fugues, although these were less abstract that those by Kupka or Klee. His early piano works often evoke Chopin, but his more mature style uses two- and three-part counterpoint, ostinato, tonal harmony and decorative chromaticism in the inner parts. In his later years he moved towards a more dissonant neoclassical idiom, and also experimented with octatonicism and a type of serial composition.