Artwork of the Day
With the Artwork of the Day we connect a work of art to one of the concert programmes. Sometimes the link is obvious, sometimes surprising or unexpected. With today: The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse (1908)
Although Waterhouse painted this work in 1908, it still speaks to the imagination. We see a young woman leaning over a garden wall to smell a rose. Her eyes are closed, her face almost pressed against the flower. It seems as if she is completely absorbed in that single, intimate moment. The rich folds of her dress, the warm brick wall and the lush greenery enhance the impression of a secluded world – a place where the outside world momentarily ceases to exist. The painting captures a mixture of longing, beauty, and a touch of melancholy. The rose here is not just a flower, but a symbol of the intangible: love, memory, perhaps even loss.
That same rose had already appeared centuries earlier in medieval literature and music. Think of Le Roman de la Rose, the famous allegorical poem in which the quest for the rose stands for the quest for love. During the concert Contre le Temps – The Kiss of the Rose, on 3 September in the Pieterskerk, singers and instrumentalists bring that world to life. They perform polyphony and poetic songs from the fourteenth century, where the rose symbolises longing and passion, but also the unattainable ideal.
In this way, painting and music meet across the centuries. Waterhouse offers us a moment of stillness between one woman and one flower; the musicians of Contre le Temps let us hear how that same image resounded in the Middle Ages, through music and poetic language. Together they tell a timeless story: how a simple rose can hold the key to the deepest emotions of the human soul.
