W. Kandinsky – Violett

Kandinsky’s stagework »Violett« (from 1914) has fascinated me since my student days. It is in every way a »Gesamtkunstwerk« which fully engages the theatrical fantasy of the audience and the pictorial imagination of the director in equal measure.

The work was conceived in the spirit of the cabaret from his Munich years before the First World War. Kandinsky revisited the piece throughout his lifetime, adding further elements which reflect his changes in style. The »Stage composition«, which inhabits a space spanning spoken and visual theatre also uses elements closer to that of an art installation. Nevertheless, the music Kandinsky (himself an amateur cellist) wrote, partly in sketch form and partly described in words, is the overarching, binding element.