To modern ears, the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov’s lush romanticism can come across as excessively sentimental and bombastic and a little hard to take. However, his symphonic poem, The Isle of the Dead, is more restrained and conveys the foreboding and melancholy you’d associate with its inspiration, the Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin’s eponymous painting.
There’s no consensus as to the landmark Böcklin had in mind when executing the piece of work he’s most famous for – so popular at one point that in his 1936 novel Despair, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that a print of the painting could be ‘found in every Berlin home’.
Some have claimed it was the English cemetery in Florence, which was close to Böcklin’s studio, that triggered the Swiss artist; others have suggested the rocky island of Strombolicchio near the Stromboli volcano in Sicily; or that it was a generic representation of a dead soul being accompanied by the ferryman Charon as they approach the underworld from the River Styx. Much of Böcklin’s work is inspired by Greek mythology.
There’s also the suggestion that the island is Ponktikonissi (mouse island), a small island off Kerkyra, which is characterised by a small chapel in the middle of a grove of cypress trees.
This latter explanation appealed to Russian-American novelist, screenwriter and film producer, Val Lewton (Vladimir Ivan Leventon) best known for his series of remarkable horror and supernatural B-movies made in the 1940s, one of which – The Isle of the Dead – was set on Kerkyra during the Balkan Wars (1912-13).
The film involves the obsessively austere, tyrannical, hubristic General Nikolas Pherides (played by Boris Karloff) preventing a group of travellers from leaving a small island hit by septicemic plague, which Pherides fears will reach his troops on the mainland.
As Pherides' stringent measures to contain the plague fail and his charges die one by one, the general loses his mind and begins to persecute a beautiful young woman, Thea, who he believes is responsible for the deaths, asserting she is a vrykolokas (vorvolakas), an undead creature that haunts the living world and murders and drinks the blood of its victims.
It was these macabre overtones evoked by Böcklin’s painting that won him the admiration of Giorgio de Chrico and, even more so, the Surrealists.