It is Halloween time! In the post of today, I am going to walk you through some pieces of classical composers that are inspired in scary stories and spooky tales.
I know Halloween has not been a traditional festivity in Spain, but lately it has become very popular. I can understand, it is a good excuse to celebrate, to go out and have fun, to meet friends and relatives...
Unfortunately, given the situation we are facing, with Covid-19 turning the life we knew upside down, this year 2020 seems to be the one in which Halloween jinks will be minimized.
On the other hand, we can use some time to discover several pieces of music that are "Halloween-related".
Do you want to know more about them? Then, please, continue reading:
I will start writing about a work of E. Grieg (1843-1907): Peer Gynt. The first version was written for orchestra, choir, soloists and reciters in 1875, and it was numbered under opus 23.
Nonetheless, the most famous version was created a few years later and there are two series of pieces under opus 46 (1888) and opus 55 (1891). Each of them include 4 pieces.
The music was inspired in a play of H. Ibsen (1828-1906). It tells the story of Peer Gynt who will meet the devil at some point during the narration. The whole tale is full of goblins, dwarves, gnomes, trolls...
"In the Hall of the Mountain King" is the title of the fourth piece of the first suite.
Even if the title is not scary at all, the music has been used for films such as "M" (1931), a thriller of F. Lang (1890-1976), where there is a crime in a German city (warning: not suitable for children!).
If you are willing to watch an animated short of the music, here you the link.
If you want to listen to an unconventional performance of the piece, don't miss this
video of the music band Apocalyptica.
Further you can take a look to a lovely "Line Rider" sliding in his sled while the music sounds and this is a performance of orchestra with choir.
In the last place, I can recommend this video where several Disney films scenes are put together using Grieg's music as a complement.
Death has inspired funeral musical melodies. We can find a bunch of funeral marches from different composers, like those of L. van Beethoven (1770-1827), F. Schubert (1797-1828), F. Chopin (1810-1849) or C. Gounod (1818-1893), among others.
Beethoven wrote several funeral marches: one for his third symphony "Eroic" op. 55 (here a performance with Abbado conducting the orchestra), another one for his seventh symphony op. 92 (this performance of Bernstein is one of my favorites), and for piano solo, he also wrote the Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Eroe, which is part of the sonata No. 12 op. 26.
"Death and the Maiden"* is the title of a
song (Lied) and a string quartet. In Schubert's music we can feel depression and anguish. Text was written by poet Matthias Claudius (1740-1815).
Listening to the music we can move from a gloomy atmosphere to an optimistic one without noticing it.
In the string quartet, the melody that represents the death and the maid is used in the second movement.
* Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman (1942) wrote a play with the same title and Roman Polanski (1933) directed a film based on the written work.
Schubert's music appears recurrently.
You can find some performances of the song sang by men (like this one of K. Moll with C. Garben on the piano part) and other sang by women (like this one of J. Norman with P. Moll playing the piano).
Alike, if you would like to listen to the piece in form of string quartet, there are several recordings available, but here I just suggest two of them (both are taken from YouTube): Amadeus Quartet and Takacs Quartet.
This famous funeral march was composed by F. Chopin and belong to the second piano Sonata op. 35. Demure and solemn, it was created as a separate piece, but it ended up as part of the big sonata.
The middle section feels like a light shining in the middle of all the darkness, offering confort.
Gounod composed "Marche funèbre d'une marionette" in 1872 for piano solo. It was orchestrated a few years later.
It became popular thanks to Alfred Hitchcock's TV shows.
The piece is not very long, it is amusing and feels a bit like a joke.
I found a performance of Taipei Symphony Orchestra which I loved!
And if you want to watch animated short films with Gounod's music, I would recommend you one produce by Tom Scott and another one of Eric Fonseca (COFA Productions), which one you like more?
As a final comment, "Little Einsteins"* has an episode titled "The princess puppet" where Gounod's piece is also used.
*By the way, I find Little Einsteins' episodes very attractive, from an educational point of view: music and art are blend together and they aim to interact with the viewers. In the future, I will devote a post to this American production.
If you want to plunge into this funeral marches universe, I am listing more composers that wrote one or even more pieces for the ones that left: Henry Purcell (1659-1695), Georg Friedrich Haendel (1785-1859) , Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888), Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), Philip Glass (1937), Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967), etc.
Please, note that I just named them. Thanks to "Saint Google" it will be very easy to find more info about them and their compositions.
F. Liszt (1811-1886) was obsessed with the Death.
You can tell just by knowing the number of compositions where She is the main character: "Totentanz" s. 126 (written in 1838), "Pensée des Morts" and "Funérailles", both belonging to "Harmonies poétiques et religieuses" and "La lugubre gondola" (1882). Liszt, mystical y virtuosistic in equal parts, also composed "Marche funèbre, en mémoire de Maximiliam I, Empereur du Mexique" S163/6.
Devil has also inspired several composers through the centuries. Once again, we can count on F. Liszt and his Mephist-Walzer*. Russian S. Prokofiev (1891-1953) wrote a devilish piano piece named "Suggestion Diabolique" op. 4/4 and French C. Saint-Säens (1835-1921) was the author of the popular "Danse Macabre" (Liszt arraged this pieces for piano solo and Saint-Saëns himself quotes it briefly in his masterwork "Carnaval of the animals").
*Mephisto (AKA Mephistopheles) is a demon featured in the German folklore. He contributes to Faust legend. There is an opera, "Mefistofele" (1868), that is the most famous composition of Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) and, more recently, we can listen to "Cats" (music by A. Lloyd Weber), where we will find a character called "Mr. Mistoffelees" that seems to be inspired in the German one.
Much before in time, Italian musician G. Tartini (1692-1770) composed a violin sonata nicknamed "Devil's Trill". Created in 1765, it was written after Tartini met the devil himself (according to a French astronomer called Jérôme Lalande).
Tartini was a gifted violin player and his piece is still, nowadays, regarded as a virtuoso composition, that poses very challenging technical needs from the performer.
I hope you have enjoyed reading the post of today. There will be a second part about this same topic, coming soon. Don't miss it!
And, besides, I am preparing a SURPRISE for next week, so if you want to know what is that about, try to keep up with the blog.
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