Ghosts of Halloween Music Past

Over the years I've posted a lot of Sunday classical music.  Here are some of my favorites from Halloween past.

Modest Mussorgsky - Night On Bald Mountain

All Hallow's Eve is followed by All Saint's Day.  This juxtaposition of the diabolical and the blessed is only dimly remembered in today's Halloween festivities.  In earlier times, it was a much more serious affair.

By the 1860s it was less serious than olden times, but the great Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky used the device of a Witch's Sabbath to channel the anti-establishment bacchanalian rebellion of his artistic community.

Walt Disney took this, and paired it with Ave Maria in his 1940 Fantasia film.  It may be the musical pinnacle of All Hallow's Eve/All Saint's Day.

Mussorgsky's rebellion caused him to burn brightly, but also to burn out early.  By the agen of 42, he had drank himself to death.  Much of his music was arranged after his death by friends such as Rimsky-Korsakov or, as in this case, Leopold Stokowski.

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre

The Dance of Death

Halloween means we need classical music with a spooky edge.  Fortunately, that's not hard to come by - you just have to get a little more adventurous with composer selection.  And quite frankly, it's hard to gt more adventurous than Camille Saint-Saëns, the late romantic French composer.  He was a child prodigy, possessed perfect pitch, and more importantly had the mind of a polymath: in addition to his many musical compositions he published scientific papers on the acoustics of ancient Roman amphitheaters, wrote the first score for a motion picture, and sailed through the newly completed Panama Canal to conduct an orchestra in San Francisco.

This piece is based on a poem by Henri Cazalis, from a very old French superstition.  Each year Death appears at midnight on Halloween and summons the dead to rise and dance while he plays his fiddle.  The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, repeated twelve times: the clock striking midnight.  The E Flat and A violin chords that follow are sometimes called the "Devil's chords".  The piece is spooky and vigorous all the way through until the end, when the music quietens to a pianissimo as the dead return to their tombs as dawn breaks.

Heinrich Marschner - Overture from the opera Der Vampyr

Image via Wikipedia

Halloween is an interesting challenge for classical music blogging.  At first it's a delight - you're surrounded by choices (Night on Bald Mountain, Toccata and Fugue, you get the idea).  But you go through the easy choices, and then the interesting exploration begins.

Because classical music is filed with great choices for Halloween.  Like today's offering, a shockingly early piece from 1828.  It sounds like it could have been written 60 years later - high romantic classical music from the year after the death of Beethoven himself.

It also has a particularly interesting take on vampires.  This opera was written a full seventy years before Bram Stoker's classic, Dracula.  Stoker (an Englishman) placed the haunt of the undead in far off Teutonic (or past Teutonic) wilderness.  Marschner (a German) placed the haunt of the undead in far off Scottish wilderness.

The story is silly (hey, it's an opera) but the plot is wrapped around vampires and pretty girls, so score one for Marschner.  It has a happy ending (hey, it's an opera), so it's perhaps a little lighthearted for the spirit of Halloween, but it's wonderful music.