Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (and Other Morbid Classics)

[scrypt]

Has everyone heard Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), Ninth Symphony and last songs on texts by Ruckert? Perhaps I didn't perform the search correctly, but it appeared to me that no one had mentioned them here so far.

For that matter, I thought that the Fourth Symphony by Sibelius (also Kullervo, Tapiola, The Swan of Tuonela and Pohjola's Daughter) might be relevant to people's interests here, as well as the work of my favorite composer, Alban Berg (Lulu, Wozzeck, the Violin Concerto (really a requiem), songs on Baudelaire and the Lyric Suite). Other relevant pieces might include Henze's songs on "Whispers from the Heavenly Death" and "Being Beauteous" and the post-homicidal madrigals of Gesualdo. Schumann's Dichterliebe are also delicately grotesque; less delicately so, R. Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten. And I can think of no greater setting of a symbolist poem than Faure's "En sourdine" on the poem by Paul Verlaine.

Also: Erwartung, by Schoenberg; Bluebeard's Castle, by Bartok (adapted beautifully for film by Michael Powell); the great piece, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, which I hate to mention because it is associated so closely with Kubrick's The Shining that its own emotional palette can be difficult for people to reclaim. There's also Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs and gloriously pessimistic "Dover Beach."

I haven't searched for Penderecki's opera, The Devils of Loudon, or his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, but I would assume they've been mentioned here. I might also mention Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, but only because it's an opera based on a symbolist play that manages to convey Maeterlinck's technique of employing surgical vagaries.

There's also "Lasciate mi morire," by Monteverdi, "Dido's Lament," by Purcell and Bach's Crucifixus from the Mass in b minor, all of which incorporate the same descending chromatic scale as "Dazed and Confused" and, in a different way, the Billie Holiday arrangement of "Gloomy Sunday." And of course, Sibelius's Symphony No. 4, like the music of several Swedish black metal bands, makes extensive use of the tritone -- the interval that might, in the most extreme cases, have caused good Christians of the dark ages to lop off the fingers of the person who played it or the tongue of the person who sang it. A similar case is that of Morricone's passacaille, which is the entire soundtrack of Argento's flick, The Stendhal Syndrome. Classical music from the medieval to the romantic tends to shun the augmented third in its themes and voice leading, using appoggiaturas and the like to avoid it, but Morricone imbeds it -- twice -- in the eight-note-long ground bass of his extended composition.

And then there is Scriabin's Ninth Sonata, which he called a "sonata of insects," and his "Vers la flamme." And his Prometheus as well, which also uses the tritone extensively. And Liszt's La lugubre gondola, as well as his Csárdás macabre; Funerailles; Bagatelle without Tonality; Nuages gris (with its famous use of the whole tone scale and augmented fifth chords, presaging Debussy's use of the whole tone scale even though the mood is far darker than his tends to be); Unstern! Sinistre, Disastro.

Also: Shostakovich's October Symphony, Eighth Symphony, 14th Symphony and Eighth String Quartet.

How do you feel about these various pieces -- is there a connection between them and the sort of fiction and philosophy that interests you? Also: Can you think of other examples?

[Nemonymous]

That's a wonderful post, Scrypt. Thanks. I love all the music you mention.
There is an excellent story by Aliya Whiteley in the anthology I edited and published of Classical Music Horror Stories in 2012, a story entitled 'Songs for Dead Children' based on the Kindertotenlieder by Mahler.
The most delightfully mournful music I can think of is 'The Curlew' song cycle by Peter Warlock. And I always think that music by Xenakis pretty nightmarish!

[scrypt]

If only I'd known about that anthology in time -- I'd have loved to submit a story. You seem to have unusually good ideas for anthology themes -- ideas that I'd have thought publishers might resist as they do intricate literacy.

I've studied and taught composition for much of my life, and made my living for many years as a studio musician and keyboardist, so the parallels between classical music and fiction are as close in my mind as skull to brain. I've written dissonant fiction and poetry based on musical forms more than once; reassuring to hear I'm not alone in that.

Did I miss anything? Would you add any other pieces to the ones I've mentioned?

[Nemonymous]

I was amazed how you covered the ground - Scriabin, Richard Strauss < Four Last Songs, Death and Transfiguration >, Mahler, Schoenberg, Penderecki, Berg, < I love Webern > , Sibelius...

Just off the top of my head, some others that may not be overtly morbid but for me they are morbid:
Much of Schubert, Winnterreise, Piano Sonatas...
Universe Symphony by Charles Ives
Some Rachmaninov like Isle of the Dead.
Beethoven's Late String quartets
As I said before, Warlock's Curlew
Britten - Death in Venice, Tenor, Horn and Strings, Turn Of the Screw
Stockhausen, Boulez, Barraques, Michael Finnissy, Schnittke, Arvo Part

Wagner - Parsifal

This type of music has in common the ability to change the rhythm of the mind. Making the inside of the head feel sometimes like a sumptuous cathedral, sometimes like a foundry of noise. Essentially Godless, but spiritual nevertheless.

I'll be back when others have left their footprints on this thread.

[scrypt]

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.

[scrypt]

[Double post; disregard; I was attempting to correct Monteverdi's name.]

[Nemonymous]

I notice you originally mentioned Shostakovich's 14th Symphony. There's a story by Nicole Cushing (a TLO member) about it in the book I mentioned earlier.

I don't think Messiaen has been mentioned yet: The Quartet at the End of Time, for example.

The whole 'Death in Venice' opera by Britten is on YouTube.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Nemonymous]

As an aside, I'd say much of the many individual segmented works of so called Classical Music is morbid at least in parts (the essential movements by mood) and specific movements, if not whole works, have generally more morbid power to worm into the mind both constructively and destructively, I feel, than most rock music or heavy metal etc. etc.

[scrypt]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

As an aside, I'd say much of the many individual segmented works of so called Classical Music is morbid at least in parts (the essential movements by mood) and specific movements, if not whole works, have generally more morbid power to worm into the mind both constructively and destructively, I feel, than most rock music or heavy metal etc. etc.

I would say that the processes at work in through-composed classical music find plangent correlates in morbid prose. John Ashbery has compared classical music to a philosophical argument in which the terms are not known, and the novels of Raymond Roussel (who was said to be an accomplished classical pianist) are very nearly a literal representation of that idea. My friend Colin Raff has said that Roussel is like an insect, and his successions of tableaux, and the flat style in which they're written, comprise an elaborate nest built by an insect to attract a mate. (Ashbery called the effect of the stringently generic illustrations for Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique an example of Roussel's "militant banality.") The patterns evident in the construction might be decorative, but we have no indication they're viewed that way by the insect (Roussel, the writer imverminating the insect, consciously leaves out any indication of a personal POV). The construction is almost automatic, predetermined by equations of nightmare, repressed/coded sexuality and mental-emotional dissonance. (By the way: We need at least one book that analyzes the use of coded language and characterization by gay writers in modernist literature. Examples: Roussel, Proust, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Tennessee Williams (in terms of characterization, not language), Elizabeth Bishop, early Auden and of course John Ashbery (who uses coded language in his poetry; characters and events in his misleadingly straightforward plays). An earlier example: Thomas Lovell Beddoes and his sexualized ecstasies of death which are like worlds and realms extrapolated from the Elizabethan metaphor (cf. Thomas Morley's "Phyllis, I fain would die now").)

Goethe also said two things that I consider to be pertinent: "Life is a disease of matter" and "architecture is frozen music." In a sense, abstract music is a dead-alive koan: the working out of an idea in absolute music is like an exploration of pathogens from beyond ; the awful vastness of its architecture, the sonic equivalent of "Trasitoen Espiral," by Remedios Varo:--



-- which in turn seems to me to be the visual equivalent of a story from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges.

Nicole:

In fact I did mention Shostakovich's 14th Symphony in the OP, and I hope you will be pleased to know that, while I personally have not yet read your story, it has been mentioned and praised by Nemonymous in this very thread.

I, too, love Schnittke. There's something luminous about his harmonies that isn't reducible to the methods of standard 20th-century composition. It isn't merely pandiatonic or polytonal; it isn't just atonal, free-tonal or dodecaphonic. It's a cohesive harmonic language made of palimpsest: haunting in that it implies and cites sounds which are familiar to us even as it decontextualizes them -- all while suffusing them with a sacred or supernatural glow. Again, I think of stained glass when I hear it in his Second Symphony. The first Concerto Grosso does it as well, as do many of his other chamber pieces, such as the madrigal, string trio and septet. His method, of systematically eroding a style or theme from a different century -- as if one were stressing a piece of fabric into a dust-worn, mold-stained, moth-train-mutilated artifact, or subjecting it to processes of mutation and accelerated aging -- is something that other composers have tried to do as well. As I said, I myself did it before I knew that Schnittke existed. Somewhere in The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats effectively wrote, masterpieces grow vague in many minds before they crystallize in one.

gveranon:

I'll have a look at Richard Powers even though the name of his novel -- borrowed from one of the most tasteful operas ever written -- sets the bar uncomfortably high, esp. if Powers' defects (cuteness, etc.) are as noticeable as you say.

Daisy:

Re Knoxville, the Pavane and Bruckner:

I, too, am a fan of Barber's Knoxville setting, as I am of the death scene from Antony and Cleopatra, the Piano Sonata and nearly all of his art songs. I am equally a fan of the music of Roger Sessions. Here's to American composers who were able to remain unoppressed by optimism.

I still love Ravel but am over my college days of worshiping his Piano Trio (with its movement in the form of a villanelle), Le Tombeau de Couperin, Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme, Miriors, "Je d'eaux", Sonatine, Daphnis et Chloé, etc. He is considered more of a neoclassicist formally than an impressionist. I adore his ascetic restraint (which is made all the more painful by his sensuality) and delicate gravitas -- which feels like a form of impassioned respect for children -- but more as a pianist and composer than as a writer. If Ravel is morbid, then it must be in a Keatsian way ("looking at life through a sweet shop window"). It is a quality he shares with Franck and Faure, who might be the greatest art song composer of all time.

Bruckner can be dark in sonority, esp. when he orchestrates like an organist (expanding on the effect of the bass pedals) and specifically in the Ninth. You haven't lived until you've awakened in Bavaria to the third movement, then drifted through the glass doors of the house and out into your host's hanging garden for a seven-course breakfast on an overcast morning -- and then, for added effect, listened to the last movement of Mahler's Ninth immediately after the Bruckner ended. The world is never more paradoxical than when the sky is matte gray, the air is misted, and verdant vines and gustatory decadence overwhelm you -- all while disembodiment bids you to follow it into the caverns of unconsciousness.

Uitarii:

Thanks so much for mentioning Lutosławski's Musique Funèbre -- his elegy for Bela Bartok and one of the greatest morbid compositions of the mid-20th century.

Luigi Nono has also written chamber pieces so spare and spectral that I consider them to be morbid: stippled with lines like ghost and smoke-swirls amid the occasional ashtray, shard of aspirin and ellipses in pointillist's dust.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by scrypt

Luigi Nono has also written chamber pieces so spare and spectral that I consider them to be morbid: stippled with lines like ghost and smoke-swirls amid the occasional ashtray, shard of aspirin and ellipses in pointillist's dust.

I listened to Tippett's 3rd Symphony while reading the whole of Scrypt's exquisite post, a post that has its own morbid music, threading information with poetry.
TLO (from my experience of it from 2005) has perhaps never before reached such heights, matching obvious despair with even more obvious hope. Not a religion so much as a belief in the power of humanity's (not any God's) creativity: steering away from pretentious oxymorons towards some natural oxygen of sound.

PS: I love Sessions.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE