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.