CIURLIONIS MIKOLAJUS KONSTANTINAS, ΟΛΟΚΛΗΡΩΜΕΝΟ

CIURLIONIS
Mikolujas Konstantinas Čiurlionis was born at Varena in southern Lithuania in 1875, the son of an organist. From the age of fourteen he studied at the music school in Plunge, acquiring a knowledge of various instruments, following this in 1894 by a period at the Warsaw Music Institute as a piano pupil eventually of the widely cultured Antoni Sygietynnski. He later studied composition with Zygmunt Noskowski, whose pupils included Szymanowski and Fitelberg, and went on to further study of composition in Leipzig with Liszt¡¦s pupil Salomon Jadassohn and Carl Reinecke. In 1902 he began to develop another aspect of his talent when he entered the Warsaw Drawing School, moving two years later to the newly established School of Fine Arts, and exhibiting in Warsaw in 1905 and in Vilnius, where he made his home in 1907. As a painter he won posthumous success with exhibitions in Warsaw, Vilnius and St. Petersburg soon after his death.

M. K. Čiurlionis - Jūra (The Sea)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY4o2G6hmaQ

Jūra was composed between 1903 and 1907 and is dedicated to his Warsaw friend and protectress, Mrs. B. Wolman. On a visit to the Wolman summer home in the Crimea, Čiurlionis first saw the Black Sea. This was the first time he experienced a sea other than the Baltic, and he was overwhelmed by its vastness. This must have been the original inspiration for Jūra, for the sea became a symbol for Čiurlionis of the "eternal becoming." Jūra was first performed in 1936 in Kaunas on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the composer's death. Čiurlionis wrote to his fiancée:

"I want to compose a symphony from out of rolling waves, the mysterious talk of the woods, the twinkling of stars, of our old songs, and my boundless longing." It took Ciurlionis a long time to create "The Sea" (duration: about 37 minutes) because the process of composition was from time to time interrupted by his cultural activity and travels to Caucasus and Western Europe (1905-1906). In addition, he had already sacrificed himself to painting by that time. The astonishing Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911) lived only to the age of 36, but like Vincent van Gogh, with whom he has many parallels, he accomplished a prodigious amount in his tragically short lifetime. No less than 300 musical compositions and an equal number of paintings have been attributed to him. Čiurlionis began to paint when he was already a mature composer and carried music over into painting. He not only used the principles of musical composition in his art work, but also gave musical terms to some of his paintings, calling them preludes, fugues, and sonatas. Especially near to and characteristic of music is the development of a theme in several paintings, where each of them reveals diverse scenes and moods. The compositional structure of the three or four-part sonata is found most often. The frequent repetition of motifs, the melodic rhythm of the lines, and the playful harmony of colors also join his painting to his music. For example, the symphonic poem "The Sea" and the cycle of paintings "The Sonata of the Sea" (1908) draw on this kind of analogy as a means of expression. Besides, one theme joins both of these works; namely the dialectics of rest and movement in the rhythm of nature. "The Sonata of the Sea" (1908) - Allegrο
(Style: Symbolism)
http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/Tapyba/Muz/Sonatos/Juros_sonata.Andante.jpg
Ciurlionis never stopped composing or painting; each medium informed the other.
Some examples of Ciurlionis’s use of musical techniques in visual art are apparent in his sonata paintings, which he assembled into series in the same way that one would construct a sonata in music. For example, Sonata of the Sea (1908) corresponds to his musical cycle The Sea of the same year. The painting is made up of three panels, “Andante,” “Allegro,” and “Finale,” and recent computer renderings have shown literal similarities between musical and pictorial lines as well as in textural analogies. However, as fascinating as Ciurlionis’s technique is, it should be remembered that for him, subject matter always transcended purely technical issues in his paintings.
"The Sonata of the Sea" (1908) - Andante
http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/Tapyba/Muz/Sonatos/Juros_sonata.Andante.jpg
http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/Tapyba/Muz/Sonatos/Juros_sonata.Finale.jpg
"The Sonata of the Sea" (1908) - Finale http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/Tapyba/Muz/Sonatos/Juros_sonata.Finale.jpg
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Περισσότερες πληροφορίες για τον Λιθουανό συνθέτη και ζωγράφο και για τα έργα του :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikalojus_Konstantinas_%C4%8Ciurlionis
http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/T_Juros_son_en.htm
http://javlb.org/bridges/2000/iss7/mkciurl.html
http://ciurlionis.licejus.lt/MKC_Muzika_en.htm
http://www.lituanus.org/2001/01_3_04.htm
http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/2011-2012/1111/articles/focus-on-art.php

*Χρήστος Ζουλιάτης
Mikolajus Konstantinas Čiurlionis - Jūra (1903)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4b6xQYq74&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4b6xQYq74