Paul Klee the musician
Paul Klee grew up in a musical environment, one which fostered his talent: His father Hans Klee taught music at the Hofwil teachers' college near Bern, and his mother Ida Marie Klee-Frick was a singer. Already at grammar school Paul Klee played the violin with the Bernische Musikgesellschaft.

Yet the decision to embark on an artist’s career slowly began to mature within him while he was still at school. For a long time he pondered the question of whether he should become a painter or a musician. Although he finally opted in favour of art and studied in Munich under Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck, until 1906 he was still earning a living playing the violin with the Bernische Musikgesellschaft. It was in Munich in 1899 that he first met the pianist Lily Stumpf, who would become his wife in 1906.

The Bern performance of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, at the newly opened Municipal Theatre, proved to be a key musical event for Paul Klee. In the blend of seriousness and merriment, fairy tale and satyr, earthly and ethereal spirit that defines Offenbach’s opera, Klee recognised a kindred artistic mind.

Paul Klee’s great passion was indeed opera; he was a regular at the Opera House, and a fine connoisseur of the entire repertory of classical and romantic operas. In his diary entries Klee commented enthusiastically, and often critically or even sarcastically, on the quality of the performances he attended.

And while he followed the emergence of modern music attentively, he did so at a remove. He knew Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schönberg personally yet never played their works. His relationship with twelve-tone music was and remained critical. He felt it was too contrived, too rational, and not sufficiently inspired. Klee was of the belief that musical abstraction was ideally expressed in the music of Bach and Mozart, and did not require further development.

Musical aspects of Klee’s art
Paul Klee’s artistic work abounds with references to music. The titles of many of his works refer directly to music, for instance alter Geiger, 1939, 310 (W 10) (Old violinist); Sängerin der komischen Oper, 1927, 10 (The singer of the comic opera); Pastorale (Rhythmen), 1927, 20 (K 10) (Pastorale – rhythms); Im Bachschen Stil, 1919, 196 (In the style of Bach).

Music was one of the decisive criteria of content and design in his oeuvre, his artistic ideas, and his educational and theoretical writings. He introduced to fine arts such terms as polyphony and rhythm, terms essentially musical in origin.

Klee’s involvement with music culminated in his interpretation of polyphonic (i.e. many-voiced) composition methods in his paintings. By overlaying different areas of colours and allowing them to intermingle he created polyphonic picture structures of a higher order which certainly allowed free interpretation as (picture) scores. Such works include Fuge in rot, 1921, 69 (Fugue in red); Landschaft in A dur, 1939, 91 (K 11) (Landscape in A major), and Polyphon gefasstes Weiss, 1930, 140 (X 10) (White framed polyphonically).