For Salvador Dali, the image of the piano and its surrealist interpretation is perhaps one of the most fascinating and constantly intriguing due to the multitude of connections he constructed with music throughout his life: his surreal relationship with musical instruments, the choice of specific melodies to listen to while painting, and the desire to make music a muse for his art.
“The world of imagination and the world of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, consistent, durable, as persuasively, cognoscitively, and communicably thick as the exterior world of phenomenal reality”. – Salvador Dalí
The depiction of the piano has roots in Dalí’s childhood, his adolescence, and the period spent with the Pitchot family. In the following years, it would become a recurring image in a different way than other symbolic images like eggs and elephants, developed later and which are often associated with his meeting with Gala in 1929 and his mystical turn at the end of the 1940s.
What happened in the young Salvador Dalí’s childhood that led the artist to transform the piano into one of his favorite iconic surrealist images?
The Dalís were great friends with the Pitchot family, a family of musicians and creative individuals who frequently organized outdoor piano concerts during the summer, moving the heavy instrument to the most unusual places—sometimes on a boat, in the middle of a bay, or on the edge of a cliff in Cadaqués, where both families used to spend their summer holidays.
“Portrait of the Cellist Ricard Pichot”, Salvador Dalí, 1920
Imagine the effect these scenes had on the young Dalí’s mind, the contrast between a solid, heavy object like a piano and the lightness of a boat, the juxtaposition of the sound produced by the pianist and the noise of the water, its jets, waves, streams, and waterfalls. The little Dalí absorbed these objects and sounds into his imaginative mind, silently gathering the suggestions and stimuli they provided. They would inhabit his mind, and after meeting Gala and reading Freud, Dalí would start illustrating them, adding his paranoid capacity to turn them into true symbolic objects.
In the 1934 painting “Mysterious Sources of Harmony”, Salvador Dalí illustrates a grand piano appearing as a large rock from which a stream of water gushes out, creating a waterfall and a basin of water below defined by concentric circles. Dalí adds a cypress, a plant also tied to the summers spent with the Pitchots , who had a large cypress in the courtyard of their home, “El muli de la torre”. Dalí loved to spend time observing and carefully drawing it.
Sometimes Dalí associates the image of the cypress with death, as he himself recounted: “I made a very detailed drawing of this cypress from life. I had observed its seed balls and been struck by their resemblance to skulls, expecially because of the jagged sutures between the two parietal bones”.
The combination of the image of the waterfall and the cypress brings to light another important aspect of Dalí’s thinking: the duality between life and death. Life is represented by water, death illustrated with the cypress tree.
For Dalí, only through symbolic death it is possible to be reborn and regain a new balance. “Death and resurrection, revolution and rebirth: Dalinian myths of my tradition”, wrote Salvador Dalí. Is it not for this reason that the cypress appears to grow from a large flat stone reminiscent of a tombstone that in turn hides a new life ready to emerge with the force of a waterfall’s jet?
In 1954,Salvador Dalí re elaborated the image of the piano in the third dimension. The sketch he made is a perfect blend of classicism and surrealism, exquisitely Dalinian. The sculpture, titled “Surrealist Piano” appears as a tribute to life. A life made of dance and music where the piano’s legs are shaped with female legs, complete with boots and frills. The master of surrealism transforms the instrument into a living being that dances to its own music .
The golden figure of the ballerina dancing on top of it is full of grace and dynamism, balanced on one foot, on tiptoe, and with her hands thrown open at the sky. the hair is flying, but the face is absent to let the viewer imagine her beauty.
She has a very slender waist that contrasts with the delicate shape of the hips.
Dalí adored this contrast, which he had noticed since his first encounter with Gala’s physique, particularly her slender waist and the delicate fullness of her hips. Dalí recounts: “I had just recognized her by her bare back. Her body still had the complexion somewhat sudden athletic tension of an adolescent’s. But the small of her back, on the other hand, was extremely feminine and pronounced, and served as an infinitely svelte hyphen between the willful, energetic and proud leanness of her torso and her very delicate buttocks which the exaggerated slenderness of her waist enhanced and rendered greatly more desiderable”.
“My Wife, Nude, Contemplating her own flesh becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture”, Salvador Dalí, 1945
Salvador Dali “Surrealist Piano” sculpture is so rich in references to the artist’s life that it seems impossible to achieve a complete codification of all the symbols and meanings Dalí attributed to it. Is it not this aspect that makes this bronze sculpture even more mysterious and interesting to our eyes?
After all, Dalí himself often declared regarding his works his difficulty in identifying the innumerable meanings of the images illustrated on them: “How can anyone expect them to understand when I myself, the “maker,” don’t understand my paintings either. The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand their meaning doesn’t imply that these paintings are meaningless: on the contrary, their meaning is so deep, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it eludes the simple analysis of logical intuition”.
On June 21st 2024, on the occasion of European Music Day, the Friends of Dalí Museums organized the conference “Salvador Dalí, la música i els músics: una història entre sardanes, jazz, òpera i rock” (“Salvador Dalí, Music, and Musicians: A Story of Sardanas, Jazz, Opera, and Rock”).
The conference, presented by the art historian Anna Pou, was held at the Cercle Sport de Figueres, focusing on the relationship between Dalí and music. Anna Pou began her talk by highlighting Dalí’s first encounters with music during his childhood. Salvador Dalí heard his first musical notes in his birthplace on Carrer Monturiol, where his father opened a notary office at the beginning of the 20th century. He likely listened to sardanas or classical compositions enjoyed by his family.
The sardana influenced the young Dalí, as Anna Pou recalled; he used dancing figures in various works, such as “The Sardana of the Witches” painted in 1920.
Dalí loved listening to music, particularly jazz and blues, as well as classical composers such as Wagner and Beethoven. “Dalí’s work is full of references to music, often featuring violins, cellos, and pianos’, explained Anna Pou.
The Salvador Dali bronze sculpture “Surrealist Piano” is an exquisite example of the relationship between Dalí and music, where the Catalan artist transforms the image of a grand piano into a surreal dancing object. This creation, which could only exist in Dalí’s imaginative mind, perfectly exemplifies the credo of the “Divine Dalí”: representing the irrational concrete object.
“My sole pictorial ambition is to materialize by means of the most imperialist rage of precision the images of concrete irrationality. The world of imagination and the world of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, consistent, durable, as persuasively, cognoscitively, and communicably thick as the exterior world of phenomenal reality. The important thing, however, is that which one wishes to communicate: the irrational concrete subject”.
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Artwork details:
Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989)
Surrealist Piano (conceived in 1954, first cast in 1984)
Bronze Sculpture with black patina
Height: 60 cm
Incised signature and numbered from the edition of 350 (+35 EA artist’s proofs)
Stamped with the Perseo Mendrisio, Switzerland foundry mark.
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