Salvador Dali was a complicated person.
I mean, I know that’s not a groundbreaking statement. Any ten-year-old could take a look at the famous surrealist’s work and tell you it was painted by a complicated person. But because the typical photo of Dali himself gives the impression that he was a kooky dude with a top-tier moustache, it’s easy to forget that there was plenty of pain in his life.
It’s hard to draw conclusions about any celebrity’s personal life, but Dali seemed to wrestle with depression, anxiety, the abuse of various substances, and he may also have harbored lifelong shame or guilt or self-questioning about his sexuality.
Perhaps the most constant thing in his life was his wife Gala. She was ten years older and had already been married, and even as their relationship cooled – and even as she sought physical closeness with several others – they remained connected. She was perhaps the only person with whom Dali was, in any way, intimate. (By some accounts, he was never physically intimate with anyone.) She was at various points Dali’s agent, friend, and constantly his muse. Any female figure in his work can reliably be estimated to be her.
In photos, Gala’s face is usually the opposite of Dali’s. Whereas he always seems to be wide-eyed and goofy, she often wears a stare that ranges from aloof to intensely soul-piercing. It is her face that adorns the cover of Swiss composer Ahren Merz’s new release, and this week’s beautiful song, “Delusional Affection.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The breathing. The constantly, slightly panicked respiration present for most of the song is meant to represent the anxiety that often overcame Dali.
2. The inspiration. According to Merz, the piece was inspired by the depiction of Gala in the painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Waking. The painting is, as you may have guessed by the title, complex. In a scene typical of Dali’s dreamscapes, a fish emerges from a pomegranate, and in turn a pair of tigers emerge from the fish and bound ominously towards a female figure; doubtless the figure of Gala.
But despite the tigers, and despite the floating rifle pointing directly at her, she seems completely unaffected. Was this the kind of serenity Dali wishes he could have cultivated? Impossible to know, but Merz’s instrumentation manages to capture both the serenity and the anxiety perfectly.
3. The tempo change. At 2:15, we shift from 4/4 to 3/4. And again, I’m not sure if this makes the song more serene or more frantic. Perhaps just more surreal; the metronome is melting like one of Dali’s clocks.
Recommended listening activity:
Buying a dream journal.