The Yellow Sound
The Yellow Sound (in German, Der Gelbe Klang) is an experimental theater piece originated by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. Created in 1909, the work was first published in The Blue Rider Almanac in 1912. The Yellow Sound was the "earliest and most influential" of four "color-tone dramas" that Kandinsky conceived for the theater between 1909 and 1914; the others were titled The Green Sound, Black and White, and Violet. Kandinsky's pieces were part of a larger trend of their era that addressed color theory and synesthesia in works that blended multiple art forms and media. Such works — Scriabin's Prometheus (1910) is arguably among the best known — utilized lighting techniques and other innovations to extend the normal range of artistic expression. Kandinsky had published his own theory on color and synesthesia in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). Kandinsky never saw The Yellow Sound performed during his lifetime. He and his Blue Rider colleagues, including Franz Marc, August Macke, and Alfred Kubin, worked intensively on a planned 1914 Munich production, but it was cancelled by the outbreak of World War I. (That original production was perhaps intended for Georg Fuchs's Künstlertheater, which had the lighting facilities required