A lost muse

Drawings by Paul Süss

After 90 years, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performed music by Leo Smit again on 6 October 2016. On a pencil draft of his work Silhouettes Smit wrote 'after drawings by Paul Süss'. For a long time, these drawings as well as Paul Süss remained obscure. Could he have been an imaginary character, dreamed up by the young Leo Smit?

When conductor Stéphane Denève studied the score, he became curious about the source of inspiration for these miniatures full of phantasy. Fifteen years after the publication of Smit's biography, he started a new search. With the help of improved search engines and an incredible growth of digitised images on the internet, we can now see for ourselves what inspired Smit: a set of postcards titled 'Tanz Silhouetten' drawn by a relatively unknown artist from Munich. Read the full story (in Dutch) on the Preludium website.