Many classical music pieces have become standard repertoire for Halloween soundtracks thanks to Hollywood film and TV. Some of these pieces were not written to be spooky or have any sense of creepiness, but have become recognizable because of their use in horror movies or shows. The most famous example of this is Bach’ Toccata and Fugue in D minor. However, other composers used macabre themes to portray horror in a different way. Here are five examples that should be included in your Halloween playlist this year.
Danse Macabre
Camille Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre is one of the more popular examples of music written about macabre themes. The piece is a tone poem describing Death bringing the dead back to life to dance with him while he plays his fiddle. Once the sun rises, they return to their graves. Saint-Saëns uses several musical ideas to bring his story to life. The piece opens with 12 harp notes, signaling the clock striking midnight. He also makes heavy use of the tritone, the most dissonant interval found in classical music, and is also known as the “Devil’s interval”. Finally, the piece is written in a minor key and uses a lot of different forms of dissonance to make the music feel dark and eerie.
Night on Bald Mountain
Night on Bald Mountain is another great example of a piece written about the macabre, but has become popular thanks to media. Modest Mussorgsky wrote the piece to tell a story of a witch’s sabbath being performed atop a “bald mountain” in Russia. The bald mountains are referenced several times in Slavic folklore, some being real and some fictional, where witches would gather for the Witch’s Sabbath. Interestingly, Mussorgsky wrote the piece in 1867, but his mentor refused to perform it. Mussorgsky was forced to insert parts from this piece into two other operas. Five years after Mussorgsky died, another Russian composer, Rimsky-Korsakov, used music from one of Mussorgsky’s operas to create his own version of “Night on Bald Mountain”. Rimsky-Korsakov’s version went on to become popular and was used for Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia. Mussorgsky’s original version was finally published and performed in 1968, and has started to gain popularity as well. Below is Mussorgsky’s original version of the piece.
The Rite of Spring, Part Two: The Sacrifice
This next piece is part of a larger work by Igor Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring is a two-part ballet that debuted to much discontent, but helped propel modern music and dance in the early 1900’s. The ballet depicts a fictional, primitive tribe celebrating the advent of spring. In part two of the ballet, a young girl is selected to be sacrificed by dancing to her death. Stravinsky’s heavy use of dissonance and extreme ranges in different instruments creates an uneasy feeling, as well as a general anxiousness about what is happening during the sacrifice.
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King is another example of classical music becoming popular through pop culture. In the Hall of the Mountain King was written as music for Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, and later extracted for Grieg’s Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1. The music tells the story of a young Peer Gynt entering the hall of the troll Mountain King. The piece begins slow and quiet, as Gynt sneaks into the hall. As the piece progresses, the music gets louder and faster, until the piece closes with loud and energetic unison hits by the orchestra. While Grieg could not bear to listen to the piece, it has become popular in media around Halloween.
Symphonie Fantastique, Movement IV
Our final example comes from Hector Berlioz. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique hasn’t quite made it into popular media like the previous examples, but the story of the symphony could be a horror movie of its own. The symphony is an example of program music, meaning it tells a specific story. The first three movements are loosely based on Berlioz’s own life events. The main character falls in love with a woman from afar and is haunted by her beauty. At the end of the third movement, the character poisons himself with opium, knowing he could never be with his love. The poison doesn’t kill him, but causes his to have a hallucinogenic nightmare. Berlioz describes the fourth movement, “The dose of narcotic plunges him into a heavy sleep. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution.” The music in the fourth movement is a dialogue between the main character and the crowd leading him to his death. It begins with a soft funeral march. Then, the crowd interrupts with sounds of cheering and fanfare. At the end of the movement, a solo clarinet plays the theme of his love, followed by a loud hit representing the fall of a guillotine. We then hear the orchestra erupt with a triumphant fanfare as the crowd cheers for justice.