C14| Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
I
talian Renaissance artists of
the 15th century were in-
spired by surviving objects
from classical antiquity.
Arches and statues and coins
influenced their work, elevating the
solid forms of architecture and sculp-
ture into the ultimate tests of an art-
ist’s talent. But over the course of the
16th century, as the center of the Re-
naissance moved north from Florence
to Venice, oil painting took on a new
prominence.
Titian, the Venetian artist who
spent decades as Europe’s most cel-
ebrated painter, found his inspira-
tion in antiquity’s inner life, in its
myths, passions and tragedies. His
love affair with ancient legends
reached its apogee in six large-scale
mythological paintings that he
calledpoesie, which conjured up a
range of human emotions and pre-
dicaments that had once been the
province of epic poetry.
Thepoesiepaintings were made
between 1551 and 1562 for Spain’s
King Philip II, the ruler of a world
empire that made the Roman version
look puny. They were probably as-
sembled in a single gallery in Ma-
drid’s Royal Alcazar Palace. But
Spain’s tumultuous 18th century saw
half of them leave the country. Sev-
eral eventually made their way to
France and later Britain; the last of
the six to be painted, “The Rape of
Europa,” ended up in Boston’s Isa-
bella Stewart Gardner Museum. The
paintings seldom if ever travel.
Now, after centuries, the six can-
vases will be reunited in a new exhi-
bition, “Titian: Love Desire Death,”
opening at London’s National Gal-
lery on March 16. Versions of the
show will then travel to three of the
loaning institutions, including Ma-
drid’s Prado Museum and the Gard-
ner.
The paintings are interpretations
of ancient myths, most of which
were narrated by the Roman poet
Ovid in his “Metamorphoses,” a
long poem full of tales of transfor-
mation. In Titian’s “Danaë,” an im-
passioned princess is ravished by
octave range, soaring from a baritone
to a falsetto with consistent control
of volume across his register. Though
untrained, his expressive voice was
eventually considered one of the best
in the business.
Randy Newman was born in Los
Angeles in 1943 into a musical family.
His father was a doctor who wrote
song lyrics for fun, and his uncles Al-
fred, Lionel and Emil were noted Hol-
lywood film composers. In a tele-
phone interview, Mr. Newman said he
took piano lessons from age 7 to age
14; by 16, he was writing and selling
songs to publishers.
Reflecting his boyhood summers
in New Orleans, with its musical
gumbo, his singing voice has a folksy,
Southern, vaguely rural drawl that
suggests gin, grit and no formal
training. In fact, however, Mr. New-
man is a sophisticated, UCLA-trained
songwriter and film composer who
knows his harmony and counter-
point.
In August 1969, around the time of
the Woodstock Festival, Nilsson was
plotting his next album and thought
of Mr. Newman, then relatively little-
known, for a collaboration. “At the
time,” Nilsson told Paul Zollo for an
article in SongTalk magazine, “he
was writing a lot of songs, and I
thought they were better songs than
what I was writing. [Randy’s] remark
was ‘I hope I don’t hurt your career.’”
Nilsson insisted on hours and
hours of rehearsals and taping, test-WHAT IF SONGWRITERStevie Won-
der had sung an album featuring Car-
ole King’s songs and piano? Or if, ig-
noring his own songs, Paul
McCartney sang a bunch of material
written by Elton John, with Sir Elton
at the keyboard.
Fifty years ago, such an album
was released: “Nilsson Sings New-
man,” a maverick matchup of two
rising singer-songwriters. Randy
Newman supplied the quirky songs
and played piano, while Harry Nils-
son eschewed his own gifted song-
writing to sing and to arrange the
background vocals. Released In Feb-
ruary 1970, the recording is a jewel
of originality, understatement and
studio wizardry.
The backstory? Two idiosyncratic
artists with disparate upbringings
but similar musical approaches de-
cided to take a risk.
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Harry
Nilsson was abandoned by his father
and raised by his alcoholic, impover-
ished, itinerant mother. He dropped
out of high school, and while work-
ing at a Los Angeles bank started
writing and demonstrating songs to
music publishers. Used in the 1969
movie “Midnight Cowboy,” his rendi-
tion of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s
Talkin’” became a top 10 hit. Suffer-
ing from heart disease and other ail-
ments, Nilsson would die at age 52.
Nilsson boasted an exceptional 3.5
BYJOHNEDWARDHASSE
BYJ.S.MARCUS
The Originality of a
Maverick Matchup
MASTERPIECE|‘NILSSON SINGS NEWMAN’ (1970), BY RANDY NEWMAN AND HARRY NILSSON
ing Mr. Newman’s pa-
tience. Then Nilsson
repaired to another
studio for weeks of
obsessive editing, re-
portedly making 118
overdubs of himself. In
his mind’s ear, Nilsson
knew what he wanted
and experimented un-
til he got it. The fin-
ished version sounds
like an entire vocal
group backing him,
but the singing is all
Nilsson’s—it’s a Nils-
son choir.
The resulting al-
bum is a masterstroke
of collaboration: To-
gether they created
something different
and superior to what
they might have done
separately with the
repertoire. At the
time, it was an un-
common twist for a
pop vocal duet album.
Their approach to
making a “songbook”
album was novel, as if
the celebrated record-
ing “Ella Fitzgerald
Sings the Cole Porter
Songbook” had Porter
accompanying Ella.
Nilsson’s singing is as sensitive as
the piano accompaniment. Mr. New-
man’s piano harmonies echo back to
such Americana as barbershop quar-
tet singing, ragtime and Tin Pan Al-
ley songs. The opposite of stadium
rock, the recording is almost as inti-
mate as a chamber recital of Schu-
bert lieder.
Mr. Newman’s songs are oftenminiature movies, offer-
ing characters, scenes
and plot lines. Irony is
his most frequent mode and econ-
omy is his M.O.
This material ranges from the mel-
ancholy “Living Without You” and the
nostalgic “Dayton, Ohio 1903” to the
comforting “I’ll Be Home,” which fore-
shadows Carole King’s “You’ve Got a
Friend.” There’s plenty of irony, too,
in “The Beehive State” and in “Love
Story,” a tongue-in-cheek, romantictale with a bleak end-
ing. Mr. Newman mines
his own past in the
wistful “Vine Street,”
while “So Long Dad”
anticipates Harry
Chapin’s “The Cat’s in
the Cradle.”
Mr. Newman often
writes lyrics in the
voices of what he calls
“aberrant personali-
ties.” This album’s
“Yellow Man,” written
at the height of the
fraught American war
in Vietnam, satirizes
racial attitudes that
stereotyped Asians.
Stereo Review
awarded it “Album of
the Year,” remarking
that Nilsson seems
“the very best choice
to sing Newman’s
songs...after all, some-
one has got to do it,
because Newman’s
voice drives too many
people up the wall.”
Little did the magazine
know that one day Mr.
Newman’s singing
would adorn Disney’s
hit “Toy Story” movies.
Half a century on, “Nilsson Sings
Newman” still sounds singular, in-
spired and fresh. If you haven’t
heard it, a sparkling aural discovery
awaits you.Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of
American music at the Smithso-
nian. He is the author/producer of
“The Classic Hoagy Carmichael”
and co-author/co-producer of
“Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.” MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGESRandy Newman at
the piano, circa 1970.Titian’s ‘Venus and
Adonis’ (top) and ‘The
Rape of Europa’ (left)
are among the six
paintings in a cycle of
mythological scenes
created in 1551-62.FROM TOP: MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO, MADRID; ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM, BOSTONICONS
REVIEW
canvas at the Prado was regarded as
the one commissioned by Philip. The
consensus has now shifted, and art
historians believe the original ver-
sion was a painting taken from Spain
as war booty by the Duke of Welling-
ton in 1813. Still part of the Welling-
ton Collection in London, where ithad been largely out of view for two
centuries, it was cleaned and exam-
ined in 2014, and will resume its
place alongside the other poesie
paintings. (The Prado now recog-
nizes its own “Danaë” as a later
work, probably from around 1565.)
One of thepoesieworks was laterMajestic
Mythologies
A cycle of large-scale paintings by Titian will be
reunited for the first time in centuries.Jupiter, who visits her in the guise
of a shower of gold. “Venus and
Adonis” depicts the goddess of love,
left heartbroken by the departure of
her younger lover, and “Perseus and
Andromeda” interprets the tale of a
hero slaying a sea monster.
The London version of the show
will also include a seventh mytholog-
ical Titian work from the National
Gallery’s permanent collection, “The
Death of Actaeon,” which was origi-
nally intended for the series but
completed much later, when the art-
ist was in his 80s. The painting,
which belongs to Titian’s fruitful late
period of looser brush-
work, shows the fate of
the huntsman who sur-
prised the goddess Diana
bathing in the woods and
was punished by being
turned into a stag and
mauled by his own
hounds.
The “Metamorphoses”
is known for its wit as
well as its gore, and Titian
is “quite close to Ovid,”
says Matthias Wivel, the
National Gallery curator
planning the London ver-
sion of the show. The art-
ist “uses humor to lure
you into something that
is tragic and horrifying.”
In “Diana and Actaeon,”
Diana’s imperious rage
and Actaeon’s looming vi-
olent death are accompa-
nied by a comically yap-
ping dog. In “The Rape of
Europa,” a princess is ab-
ducted by Jupiter, this
time in the form of a bull;
as they make their way
across the Aegean Sea,
with Europa clinging for
dear life to her captor’s
horn, they are watched by
a cavorting Cupid riding a dolphin.
Though nearly all the works have
long been regarded as masterpieces,
the show coincides with new schol-
arly conclusions and discoveries. Ti-
tian and his assistants may have cre-
ated nine or more versions of the
Danaë tale, but until recently thecut down, while others
were damaged in transit.
“The Rape of Europa” is
regarded as the most in-
tact, says Nathaniel Sil-
ver, a curator at the
Gardner. Nevertheless, he
adds, a cleaning com-
pleted last year reveals
new details. Viewers can
now detect a contrast be-
tween the white of Eu-
ropa’s tunic and the bull’s
white fur, “which looked
the same color before,”
he says. A blurry distant
scene is revealed to be a
group of cows, which
played a part in the story
of Europa’s abduction.
For Venetian art ex-
perts and aficionados,
“Titian: Love Desire
Death” is the show of the year. “I
plan to see it twice,” says Bastian
Eclercy, the Italian paintings curator
at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt,
Germany, who has his eyes on both
the London and Madrid versions.
“It’s a one-in-lifetime thing to have
them all together.”