Music inspiration

Special exhibition 
Music as inspiration - Beethoven's compositions in modern art
10 March to 21 July 2025

Beethoven's works repeatedly inspired painters, graphic artists and sculptors to create their own works as early as the 19th century. But it was only in the second half of the 20th century that his music became more important to artists of the European avant-garde. Until then, the works created in Germany and Austria were mostly still characterised by the tradition of figurative-allegorical depictions. The current special exhibition at the Beethoven-Haus uses a selection of important works to show the variety of different ideas and approaches with which Beethoven's music was approached in the 20th and 21st centuries and which endeavoured to make it quasi visible to the viewer.

In the middle of the century, art was characterised by an exaggerated veneration of Beethoven and the resulting backlash, which distanced itself from the works of the great ‘cultural icon’. ‘Only since the 1970s has there been an increasing willingness to engage with Beethoven's compositions. From then on, numerous, very different and appealing approaches were developed - from the creation of figurative representations to purely abstract colour compositions,’ explains art historian Silke Bettermann, who curated the exhibition. The artworks created deal with the music of the Bonn composer in a very individual way, such as the optical scores by Günther Uecker (*1930), the various collages and graphics by Arman (1928-2005), or the lithographs by Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007), some of which deliberately avoid a generally accessible interpretation.

The transfer of an auditory experience into a picture, which was already popular in the 19th century, was also taken up again and organised in a very personal way. This can be seen, for example, in a photographic work by Rebecca Horn (1944-2024), who was inspired by a performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto op. 61 in New York. It combines a night-time snapshot with a self-portrait and various gestural traces of colour added in a second step. The picture thus refers to a perception altered by the music and reflects the subjective experience of listening to the music.

Such works are often difficult for a wider audience to understand. The situation is different with colour-intensive abstract colour compositions such as those created spontaneously by Norman Sigbert (1892-1980), Christel Bak-Stalter (*1937) or Peter Fischerbauer (*1966) under the influence of Beethoven's music. ‘Such highly emotional works are generally accepted and appreciated as an adequate visual form of expression for musical experiences,’ says Silke Bettermann. Right up to the present day, this has remained the path that visual artists are most likely to take when they want to capture classical compositions in pictures.

In recent decades, completely new attempts have also been made to deal with the musical material of individual Beethoven compositions in a concrete way. Baldwin Zettl (*1943), for example, transferred the text of the ‘Flea Song’ from Goethe's drama ‘Faust’, set to music by Beethoven, directly into the picture by showing three bizarre-looking figures - the flea mentioned in the song with a henchman and his king at its head - marching along a piano keyboard. The last bars of the setting can be seen on the music stand above the figures.

Benjamin Samuel (*1981) pursues an almost mathematical approach. He uses computer software to transfer the Diabelli Variations into an abstract light installation. He assigns a colour to each note of the piano piece, while the notes that are played at the same time appear in the resulting mixture of colours. In this way, colour sequences develop that visually reveal the complexity of the composition. Jorinde Voigt (*1977), on the other hand, emphasises the visual translation of the emotional spectrum of the music in her graphics for Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. Based on the performance markings contained in the musical text of the individual pieces, she intuitively creates a basic structure for lively, almost three-dimensional swirls of lines that express the emotional power of Beethoven's individual compositions.

A final aspect that visual artists like to address when dealing with Ludwig van Beethoven is the relationship between the musical work and the person of the composer. In the second half of the 20th century, Thomas Bayrle (*1937) was the first to break new ground here: he superimposed a historical portrait of Beethoven and the musical score of the so-called ‘Moonlight Sonata’ op. 27 No. 2 in order to make the connection between the artist's personality and the music spontaneously recognisable.  
As all these examples show, Ludwig van Beethoven's compositions are still an important and lively source of inspiration for the visual arts today.

Press photos

Opening hours of the Beethoven-Haus Museum: 
Wednesday to Monday
10 am to 6 pm 
Closed on Tuesdays

Tickets can be booked at www.bonnticket.de or purchased in the Beethoven-Haus shop.

Contact
Ursula Timmer-Fontani 
Head of Corporate Communications 
Beethoven-Haus Bonn 
Tel. 0228 98175-16 
timmer-fontani@beethoven.de