Musical pleasures for a classical Halloween

As we near Halloween – and indeed, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, which are heavily linked to the Gaelic Samhain, with its Celtic pagan origins – there are plenty of lists and playlists around to get the 21^st century, US-influenced party going.

There are also lists of classical music suggestions for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve.

 

In the latter category, there are obvious pieces that sprint to mind: Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain (1867) and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) top the list, both having been introduced to many people over the years by being used in Disney’s 1940 animated classic, Fantasia.

 

In terms of creep credentials, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (penned sometime between 1704 and 1750) takes some beating. Heard in an orchestrated version at the opening of Fantasia, with a silhouetted Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, it had made a horror impact years earlier.

Johann Sebastian was probably not intending to make audiences shiver, but the work had already been heard in the 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1934 horror classic, The Black Cat – and it has been used many times since in suspense and horror contexts, including in the 1962 adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera.

Personally, of the more obvious pieces, I’d go for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) – and not just for the final movement, Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath (surely the template for a scratchy ‘witchy’ sound) – but also for the short fourth movement before it, March to the Scaffold.

And let us not forget a quick mention for Danse macabre, an 1874 tone poem from Saint-Saëns that has been used in many media – including in an adapted form as the theme tune to the BBC mystery crime series Jonathan Creek.

 

However, there are less obvious and less fantastical choices if you want something to tune into over the coming days, as the ‘thinning’ between this world and the next that is marked during Samhain, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day perhaps calls for a more contemplative approach.

 

Let’s start with Mahler’s Symphony No1 in D major (Titan), composed between late 1887 and early 1888. It is full of musical joys, but the one that concerns us most in this context comes in the third movement.

Here, the composer took the children’s song Bruder Jakob – Mahler knew it as Bruder Martin and it’s more widely known still as Frère Jacques – switched it into a minor key and made it part of a funeral march.

The effect is unnerving to say the least.

In non-Halloween terms, the fourth movement is fascinating in all sorts of way and, in places, seems to echo Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture while equally prefiguring John Williams’s marches for the Star Wars films.

 

Sticking with Mahler, the 1904 song cycle, Kindertotenleider (Songs on the Death of Children) is also worth spending time with. Based on a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34, after the death of two of his children, the composer set five of them to music.

Mahler himself was no stranger to such tragedy: eight of his own siblings had died in childhood and his second child, Maria, died at the age of four from scarlet fever.

He had carried on composing Kindertotenleider just shortly after the birth of Maria – something that horrified his wife Alma – and after the child’s death he wrote to a friend that “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died”.

 

The work remains a haunting one of grief and loss.

 

If death is the one inevitability that we all share, then a much more recent work portrays it in a way that is every bit as haunting as Kindertotenleider.

 

Totentanz, by Thomas Adès, was composed for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and large orchestra, and was premiered in July 2013 as part of the Proms.

 

The music sets an anonymously authored text that appeared under a 15^th century frieze in the Marienkirche in Lübeck in northern Germany. This had shown “members of every category of human society, in strictly descending order of status, from the Pope to a baby. In between each human figure is an image of Death, dancing and inviting the humans to join him,” as Adès described it.

 

I missed that Prom, but coincidentally had been to Lübeck and visited the Marienkirche just a few months before that Proms premiere. I could hardly have been more excited when, earlier this year, just before lockdown, it was finally released on a new Deutsche Gramophon CD, Adès Conducts Adès (the disc also includes Gershwin expert Kirill Gerstein on piano for Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – a work strongly influenced by the great Gershwin).

 

Totentanz is a magnificent piece – amusing at the beginning in its sense of the powerful no longer having power in the face of mortality, but moving and genuinely sobering as it progresses toward its climax, where Death finally takes a baby.

 

The Totentanz mural in Lübeck was created in the confessional chapel in the Marienkirche in 1463 by Bernt Notke, a year before the plague reached the city from the south. It differs from similar artistic reminders of morality in that the background is recognisable as the spires of Lübeck. It was replaced by a copy in 1701 and destroyed by bombing in 1942 (see pre-war photo  of part of it at the top of this page).

 

Whether or not it is the perfect piece for contemplation in this time of a pandemic, I highly recommend Adès’s work.

 

Have a good weekend – and if you have any recommendations of your own, please share them here.

A Secret Garden for our age

In 2019 BC (Before COVID) when The Other Half and I were still regularly visiting the cinema on our way home from work on a Friday, we had already seen, more than once, the trailer for a new adaptation of Frances Hodgson’s Burnett’s classic children’s novel, The Secret Garden.

Trailers are teasers, of course  but this one provoked optimism and indeed prompted me, in February this year (still just about BC) to re-read the book.

 

The copy had been my mother’s, which I had brought home when I cleared my parents' home after their deaths. 

It was a new edition from 1942, with colour plates, a tattered dust jacket and inside, a loose, unfilled bookplate from the token with which she had almost certainly bought it for her eleventh birthday.

On the bookplate was a picture of a giant tulip growing up from bombed urban ruins.

I hadn't seen the bookplate for years but, while I remembered it visually, it was only this year that I felt a sense of what it was about.

 

On 3 May the year, CE (COVID Era), on the third anniversary of my mother’s death, the book and plate found itself in a poem I wrote about her.

 

Today, I finally caught up with the new film, released in a hodgepodge of ways, given the pandemic, including via Sky Cinema.

 

The novel was written in 1911, but Burnett's work avoided any of the cloying sentimentality that might have been left over from the Victorian era. Both Mary Lennox and her cousin Colin are unpleasant children: as we discover, that is a direct result of their respective upbringings, and redemption and reform is possible.

 

Mary has been orphaned; Colin has lost his mother and been confined to a room in the family manor by, in effect, his father’s utter terror that his son is weak and will die like his mother before him.

 

Here, the film has been updated to 1947. And it suits a version of the story that reflects today’s far greater awareness and understanding of psychology, of mental health and ill health, of grief, loss and much more.

 

It also chimes with our growing understanding of the restorative – and indeed, redemptive – nature of nature. This is a film that, without doing so clunkily, acknowledges the benefits of nature for mental health, and thereby presents a subtle but strong environmental message too.

 

Nature needs to be healthy for us to be healthy. We cannot exist separately.

 

Jack Thorne’s script is to be applauded for all this – and for its eschewing of an easy sentimentalisation of the story; for making Mary and Colin both initially unpleasant, but also understandable and redeemable. It’s a fine line, and one that the film charts well.

 

Director Marc Munden lends the story a sense of the magical that is far more pronounced that in the novel, but it works – again feeding into that environmental theme.

 

This is a small cast, but Dixie Egerickx as Mary, Edan Hayhurst as Colin and Amir Wilson as Dickon are excellent as the children upon whose shoulders any sense of believability in this fable rests.

 

As the adults, Colin Firth as Lord Craven and Julie Walters as housekeeper Mrs Medlock are … well, precisely what you’d expect from a pair of such fine actors.

 

If I have a criticism, it’s primarily that Dickon and his sister (Isis Davis) are not seen as fully as they are in the novel and that we don’t get as full a sense of the Yorkshire moors in the film as we do in the novel.

 

But this is probably a bit whiny – and I have to say that I do love the giant rhubarb!

 

Flights of glorious nature writing

In May 2018, on a brief sojourn to Margate as part of my extended recuperation following cancer surgery, The Other Half and I found ourselves visiting the Turner Contemporary, taking in an exhibition about the relationship between animals and humans.

In the shop, we came across copies of H is for Hawk, signed by author Helen Macdonald, who had (presumably) been at the previous evening’s opening and had either been asked to sign them or had undertaken a Gaimanesque exercise in guerrilla autographing.

 

Finding that the book was about the author’s struggle with grief at the loss of her father – and the role of a goshawk in dealing with that – I picked it up. The sentiments might have been different, but my own father had died exactly a week before my surgery and exactly 50 weeks after my mother.

 

Reading it was a difficult emotional journey, but its impact was such that, when I saw that Macdonald had a new book out, I wasn’t going to wait for the paperback.

 

In her introduction, she explains that Vesper Flights is intended to be a literary version of 16^th century Wunderkammer – usually known in English as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, but far better understood with a literal translation from the German of ‘cabinet of wonders’. Boxes and cabinets that were, in effect, small museums/galleries, they could contain anything from bones or fossils to works of art.

 

These essays, new and collected, are Macdonald’s effort to combine both science with the power of literature to inspire in readers a better understanding of the magical nature of nature, and what we stand to lose in the environmental calamity that is already befalling our planet.

 

But there’s a thing: “our planet”? One of the threads that runs crystal clear through Macdonald’s book is that we neither own ‘nature’ nor the lives of Earth’s non-human residents.

 

She wants to use literature to awaken (or reawaken) a sense of awe at the natural world – and with it, a greater sense of urgency at what is at risk in terms of the environment.

 

From considering the class nature of attitudes toward watching or keeping birds, to the relationship created by hides and feeding birds and mammals, Macdonald is determined to make us think with more detail about our relationship with the rest of the world.

 

Indeed, one of the points that comes through is that humanity is not apart from nature – but part of it. And there is a disconnect and massive problem in not realising that.

Some of my own shelves

Since Macdonald is such a very good writer, she succeeds: the essays capture a sense of the ephemeral and the mysterious; of the lives of birds and creatures that we do not understand, but are no less real, lived lives.

And with all this, a sense of the extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious world that we are already losing – and will lose altogether, if we do not act soon.

 

It is a collection that also has the power to feel deeply personal.

 

For instance, there is one moment when the author describes how, as a child, she collected her own Wunderkammer – using her nature findings to decorate the shelves of her burgeoning nature library.

 

Reading it was a sort of jolt, as I realised I’ve been doing the same thing in recent years. A personal Wunderkammer.

 

This is a deeply serious book, with a deeply serious purpose. Don’t let that put you off. It will haunt you, but it is wonderfully written and a joy to read – and will hopefully inspire many to increase their contributions to saving this extraordinary planet and the incredible, awesome range of life that lives on it. 

 

Do buy (or get your library to do so).