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So happy to hear you say you love Webern! I only left him out (as well as a lot of my favorite music) due to the rather specific criteria.

I own the scores to several Webern pieces and have gotten into arguments with other musicians by insisting that his music is even more perfect than Bach's. And while he had one of the least morbid dispositions in the history of music, I think his compositional models and mentors left their imprint: specif. in the decadent refinement of orchestral color evidenced in Mahler and which Webern took further than anyone before him. The fact that his over-refinement was meant to express an elision between the implications of Schoenberg's method and those of medieval composers like Ockeghem and Dufay (cf. the hocket's influence on Klangfarbenmelodie) doesn't diminish the slightly creepy effect of, say, his Symphony op. 21: perfectly mirrored sculpted gardens made entirely of stained glass and engineered in the shapes of vicious insects. It's hard to think of anything more gorgeous.

The Grosse Fuge, the a minor Quartet (op. 132) and the Missa Solemnis are probably my favorite pieces by Beethoven; but again, I'm not completely sure that the grotesque mutation of classical form in his later work is what I'd characterize as morbid. In late Shostakovich, you can practically hear the bones of skeletons clinking.

You said exactly the same thing in your post, so I'm not trying to contradict you. I'm only pointing out why I didn't include some of the pieces I love beyond nearly all others.

Now that I think of it, though, there is a paring away of the physical in late Beethoven that could be seen as morbid; you can hear that in the Sanctus of the Missa Solemnis and in the head music at the center of op. 132's second movement. I take it back; I think you're right about him.

I ought to have included the Boulez of Le Marteau sans Maitre and Pli Selon Pli; we're absolutely in agreement about that. I find Strauss's four last songs to be tragically insincere, but perhaps that's the influence of Donald Jay Grout's prejudices (he called Strauss "devoid of spiritual refreshment"). I do prefer Strauss at his most deliberately twisted and complex (as in the fugue from Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I like to scrutinize after listening to the Bach b-minor fugue that *also* contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale -- as you probably know, it's at the end of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1).

I'm delighted you mentioned the piece by Peter Warlock, because he's a composer I don't know and that's a composition I've never heard.

I wanted to include Schnittke, but even his Faust doesn't strike me as particularly morbid. Interesting thing about him: Right after college, I realized that postmodernism made it possible to use styles as one would themes, and that entire pieces could be organized around the technique of switching or combining centuries. Not knowing anyone else had done it, I coined what I thought was a new word -- polystyle -- only to discover Schnittke and the fact he'd been doing it -- as Gerhard Richter did representational/nonrepresentational switching -- since the late '60s.

The first piece I ever heard in my life was Gesang der Junglinge by Stockhausen, which my mother had because of the similarity of the boys' voices to those of cantors (she was a music and English teacher). Again, I don't think it's an accident you included him even though I wouldn't call his music morbid. There's a specificity to his Webern-informed technique of total integration that complements morbidity's over-refinement so well that you wish there had been a morbid Webern simulacrum. In that sense, I would actually draw parallels between Mahler, R. Strauss, Karl Kraus and Ligotti.

Do you know Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf? He's another one. Christine Schaefer has done an absolutely brilliant version of his art songs; I love her version of Pierrot Luniare, too, and especially that neglected masterpiece, Herzgewächse.

I've heard all of the Britten you mentioned except Death in Venice, which is an interesting choice for him. I love Britten, but I've always thought he was the wrong composer to set the Illuminations (Henze's score for four celli, two harps and soprano is the perfect expression, I think, of Rimbaud's discorporate sexuality: "Our bones are clothed in a new and amorous body"). I'm so used to the Visconti adaptation that I'm almost afraid to hear Britten's version -- but I'll have a listen because you recommended it.

Wagner can definitely be strange, morbid, perfumed and convoluted, as Visconti's Ludwig II should make clear to anyone. Again, it was probably prejudice on my part, leaving him out (my Jewish mother use to tell me ridiculous stories about playing in productions of Wagner -- she hated him for reasons that probably weren't musical at all). She was the one who first told me that Nietzsche threw up during the climax of Tristan, which is not really how it happened; F.N. worshiped Wagner and even tried to compose like him.