In writing about Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem, I mentioned how that inevitable event (death) had occasioned so much beautiful music. Hence, facing the depth of winter, I decided to assemble some of the most profound examples of macabre music.
Henry Purcell (1659-1695) remains Britain’s greatest composer. His Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary is a Baroque masterpiece composed for the 1695 burial of Queen Mary II. Renowned for its solemnity and innovative use of brass, it has become a staple of royal state funerals in England. Tragically, the music was performed again in Westminster Abbey just months later for Purcell’s own funeral in November 1695. Mary was 32 when she died, Purcell was 36.
Ich habe genug (BWV 82) is one of J.S. Bach’s most celebrated and intimate sacred cantatas. Composed in 1727 for the Feast of the Purification of Mary (Candlemas), it reflects on the biblical story of Simeon, an elderly man who is ready to die peacefully after finally seeing the infant Jesus.
- Aria: Ich habe genug
- Recitative: Ich habe genug
- Aria: Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen
- Recitative: Mein Gott! wenn kömmt das schöne: Nun!
- Aria: Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Bass
Munchener Bach Orchester
Karl Richter Conductor
Someone said that Schubert could do in three minutes what it took Verdi or Wagner to accomplish in three hours, more like five for Wagner. Schubert wrote more than 600 songs in his achingly short life. Collectively, they are the greatest compilation of songs ever written. Three of the greatest are about death.
Der Erlkönig was written in about two hours. He revised the song three times before publishing his fourth version in 1821 as his Opus 1. Set to a poem by Goethe, the song has four characters -a narrator, father, son, and the Erlking. The piano part is famous for its relentless, “devilishly difficult” octave triplets that represent the galloping of a horse through a stormy night. The piano accompaniment was so difficult that Schubert couldn’t play it. He was a mediocre pianist. He made a simplified revision of the song that allowed him to accompany the singer of the piece.
The narrative follows a father riding a horse through a dark forest at night, holding his feverish son. The child begins to hallucinate the Erlking, a malevolent spirit who tries to lure the boy away with promises of games and beauty. The father tries to calm the boy, dismissing the visions as mist or the wind. When they finally reach their destination, the father discovers the child has died in his arms. The music clearly delineates which of the four is speaking. The dramatic narrative is beyond brilliant.
Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) was written in 1817 when the composer was 20. The song is based on a poem by Matthias Claudius. It is a brief, dramatic dialogue between two figures. The Maiden begs the “fierce man of bones” to pass her by because she is still young. Death responds with a somber, steady melody in a low register. Death consoles her, claiming to be a friend who comes to bring peaceful sleep rather than punishment. The music is characterized by its dactylic rhythm (long-short-short), which mimics a funeral march or a steady, inevitable knock.
In 1824, Schubert used the song as the basis for the second movement of his 14th String Quartet. The quartet, the middle one of the composer’s last three, is known as Death and the Maiden. These final three are among the greatest compositions in the genre.
Schubert’s Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey) was written in 1827, the year before Schubert’s death. He corrected the final proofs when on his deathbed. It is a song cycle of 24 Lieder for voice and piano set to poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is one of the bleakest – and greatest – works in all of Western music. A rejected lover leaves the town at night and wanders through a frozen landscape. But this isn’t really a travelogue – it’s a psychological journey. It moves from alienation to obsession to bitterness to numbness and finally to intimations of death. There is no redemption, no return, no consolation. The last song, Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-gurdy man), is one of the eeriest endings ever written; it depicts stasis, emptiness, and a question with no answer.
Over there beyond the village
stands a hurdy-gurdy man,
and with rigid fingers
he turns it as best he can.
Barefoot on the ice
he totters back and forth;
and his little plate
always remains empty.
No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him;
and the dogs snarl
around the old man.
And he lets it go,
everything as it will,
he turns, and his hurdy-gurdy
never stands still.
Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?
‘The Liebestod’ (Love Death) is the aria that ends Wagner’s epochal Tristan und Isolde. Why does it feel overwhelming? Musically, there is endless melodic ascent, orchestral waves that erase and pulse. The voice is carried by sound, not standing against it. Isolde doesn’t sing over the orchestra – she is submerged in it. Death is not a tragedy. Unlike Die Winterreise, there is no emptiness, no stasis, no silence. This is erotic transcendence, not existential negation. If Schubert ends with a man turning a handle in the cold, Wagner ends with the universe breathing itself through a human voice. The soprano is Birgit Nilsson, the definitive Isolde of the second half of the last century.
Verdi’s depiction of the end of the world, the day of judgement, is filled with cosmic terror. God can get very, very, very angry. The music says everything about what might await us. While it is the second movement, the Dies Irae theme recurs throughout the work, including in the final ‘Libera me’ section, to remind the listener of the looming judgment. Verdi’s conception defines genius. How did he ever conceive this? The video below repeats the section several times. By its end, you should be scared witless.
Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is a setting of five poems by Friedrich Rückert, who wrote over 400 such poems following the deaths of two of his own children from scarlet fever. Mahler’s choice of text was eerily prophetic; though he wrote the cycle while his own children were healthy, his eldest daughter, Maria, died of scarlet fever just a few years after its completion in 1907. The texts of the five poems are here.
The Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder), for soprano and orchestra, were composed in 1948 when Richard Strauss was 84. They are – except for the song Malven (Mallows), composed later the same year – Strauss’ final completed works.
The songs are ‘Frühling’ (Spring), ‘September’, ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ (When Falling Asleep) and ‘Im Abendrot’ (At Sunset). The title Four Last Songs was provided posthumously by Strauss’s friend Ernst Roth, who published the four songs as a single unit in 1950 after Strauss’s death.
Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere was given at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. All of the songs but ‘Frühling’ deal with death, and all were written shortly before Strauss himself died. They are suffused with a sense of calm, acceptance, and completeness. Towards the end of ‘Im Abendrot’, after the singer’s intonation of “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”), Strauss quotes his own tone poem, Death and Transfiguration, written 60 years earlier. As in that piece, the quoted seven-note phrase (known as the “transfiguration theme”) has been seen as the fulfillment of the soul through death.
The title of this article includes ‘Rebirth”. Regardless of tone – hopeful or desolate – the great music that the subject has birthed justifies the word.
