Muchacha al piano (La obertura de Tannhäuser)

The music in the title is the point. Cézanne painted this around 1869 at Jas de Bouffan, his family's estate near Aix, and the two women are his own mother and sister. The girl at the keyboard is playing the overture to Wagner's opera Tannhauser. In France at that moment Wagner was the banner of the daring new art, loved by the young and mocked by the establishment, so naming the piece was itself a small statement of taste. Cézanne was still in his dark, heavy-handed early years. He built the whole scene out of blacks and whites, the striped chair, the figures and the wall pressed into one dense, quiet world, with none of the loudness the subject might suggest.