Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (and Other Morbid Classics)

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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?